Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, was born the year that Napoleon died, 1821. In her younger days, she lived in an atmosphere of mysticism. Mesmerism was everywhere in evidence, and much had been said about "Animal Magnetism," "Power of Mind over Matter," "the Shakers," "Faith Healing," etc., long before Mrs. Eddy had thought or heard of these things. She married George W. Glover in 1842, who died the following year, leaving Mrs. Eddy a widow at twenty-three. From that time until about 1870, Mrs. Eddy lived a sad and sordid life of ill health, poverty and unhappiness. In 1853, she had married Dr. Daniel Patterson, a dentist, but this proved an unhappy union and they were much separated, and finally divorced. During all this time she had drifted from one place to another, wearing out her welcome at every place she went, and usually leaving each place after having caused family discord in the household. She was practically an invalid during this period, which may account for her peevishness, ill-temper, domestic selfishness, and want of consideration for those who had befriended her. In 1862, being then forty-one years old and a nervous wreck, and attracted by the stories of wonderful cures by Dr. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, Mrs. Eddy visited that famous occultrist at Portland, Maine. Dr. Quimby had learned much of his philosophy, and all of his mesmeric tricks, from Charles Poyen, whom he had followed about from place to place. About three years before Mrs. Eddy called on him, Quimby had perfected his system of mental healing and had reduced it to writing, having discarded the mesmeric part of it. Various disinterested persons are still living who have given reliable testimony to these facts, as also to the following: (1) When Mrs. Eddy first visited Quimby she was a physical wreck; (2) After three weeks' treatment from Quimby she was a well woman; (3) She borrowed, and had in her possession for a long time, a copy of Quimby's manuscripts; (4) She never gave Quimby credit for one bit of her "Discovery"; and even went so far as to abuse him for the rest of her life. Please remember the dates: Mrs. Eddy first called on Quimby in 1862. In February, 1866, she slipped on an icy sidewalk and sustained a severe nervous shock. On the same day she called on Dr. A. M. Cushing for medical treatment. Dr. Cushing says she continued to take his medicines until she was cured. Mrs. Eddy denies that she took any of the medicines after the first visit, and says that she cured herself in a miraculous way and rose as one from the dead, and that she depended solely on God. Yet, she called on this same Dr. Cushing the following August to be treated for a cough! During these days it is known that she spent much of her time writing, and reading the _New York Ledger_, and, if we are to believe what she wrote to a friend, she also read "_Irving's_ Pickwick Papers." She apparently did not like Dickens.