# The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy/Chapter 15

CHAPTER XV
THE MASSACHUSETTS METAPHYSICAL COLLEGE ORGANISED—DEATH OF ASA GILBERT EDDY—MRS. EDDY'S BELIEF THAT HE WAS MENTALLY ASSASSINATED—ENTRANCE OF CALVIN A. FRYE
The organisation of the Christian Science Church in August, 1879, seems to have suggested the organisation of another institution, which, in the history of the Christian Science movement, is second in importance only to the Church itself. The Massachusetts Metaphysical College was chartered January 31, 1881, and between that date and 1889, when it closed, about four thousand persons studied Christian Science in this institution, and to-day many practising healers have the degree of C.S.B., C.S.D., or D.S.D. from Mrs. Eddy's college.
The college was organised something more than a year before Mrs. Eddy removed permanently to Boston, and was, in the beginning, one of the experiments by which she strove to rehabilitate herself in Lynn. Its charter was issued under an act passed in 1874, an act so loose in its requirements, resulting in the chartering of so many dubious institutions and the granting of so many misleading diplomas, that, in 1883, ​medical institutions chartered under this act were prohibited from conferring degrees. The purpose of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, as stated in the articles of agreement, was: "To teach pathology, ontology, therapeutics, moral science, metaphysics, and their application to the treatment of diseases." The signers to the articles of agreement were: Mary B. G. Eddy, president; James C. Howard, treasurer; Charles J. Eastman, M.D., Edgar F. Woodbury, James Wiley, William F. Walker, and Samuel P. Bancroft, directors; all students of Mrs. Eddy's except Charles J. Eastman, who had been a pupil in the little "dame's school" which Mrs. Eddy taught at Tilton for a few months during her first widowhood, and who at this time had a doubtful medical practice in Boston.
The name "Massachusetts Metaphysical College" is some what misleading. During the nine years of its existence this institution never had a building of its own, or any other seat than Mrs. Eddy's parlour, and, with very incidental exceptions, Mrs. Eddy herself, during all this time, constituted the entire faculty. In short, the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, subsequently of such wide fame among Christian Scientists, was simply Mrs. Eddy, and its seat was wherever she happened to be. To call it an institution was a very literal application of the boast of the old Williams alumni that Mark Hopkins on one end of a saw-log and a student on the other would make a college.
The organisation of the college in 1881 in no way changed Mrs. Eddy's manner of instruction. Her new letter-heads, ​indeed, told the public that the Massachusetts Metaphysical College was located at Number 8 Broad Street, Lynn, but the name was the only thing which was new. Classes of from two to five students continued to meet on the second floor of Mrs. Eddy's house, as before, and she gave but one course of study: twelve lessons in mental healing, very similar to those she had given to Miss Rawson, Mrs. Rice, and their fellow-students eleven years before except that "manipulation" was now discountenanced, and denunciation of mesmerism was a prominent feature of the lectures. The tuition fee was still three hundred dollars, the price which Mrs. Eddy says she fixed under Divine guidance; although, in many instances where the student was unable to pay that amount, she took one hundred dollars instead.
When Mrs. and Mr. Eddy moved to Boston in the early spring of 1882, they soon took a house at 569 Columbus Avenue, Mrs. Eddy's first permanent home in Boston, and on the door placed a large silver plate bearing the inscription, "Massachusetts Metaphysical College." At about this time Mr. Eddy's health began to decline, and both he and his wife believed that he was suffering from the adverse mental treatments of Edward J. Arens.
After the charge of conspiracy to murder, brought in 1878, a coldness developed between Mr. Arens and the Eddys. He came to Boston, and began to exercise some originality in his practice and teaching, which was, of course, very obnoxious to Mrs. Eddy. In 1881 Mr. Arens published a pamphlet entitled Theology, or the Understanding of God as Applied to Healing the Sick. In this pamphlet Mr. Arens quoted extensively from Science and Health, using the text of Mrs. ​Eddy's work where it answered his purpose, but substituting his own ideas for many of her statements which he believed were extreme or untenable. In his preface he announced that he made no claim to the authorship of the doctrine which he advanced, stating that it had been practised by Jesus and the apostles, by the secret association of priests known as the Gottesfreunde in the fourteenth century, and in the nineteenth century by P. P. Quimby of Belfast, Me. He added that he had made use of "some thoughts contained in a work by Eddy." The third edition of Science and Health appeared a few months later, containing a preface signed by Asa G. Eddy, which scathingly denounced Arens as a plagiarist, and paid the following tribute to Mrs. Eddy:
"Mrs. Eddy's works are the outgrowths of her life. I never knew so unselfish an individual, or one so tireless in what she considers her duty. It would require ages and God's mercy to make the ignorant hypocrite who published that pamphlet originate its contents. His pratings are coloured by his character, they cannot impart the hue of ethics, but leave his own impress on what he takes. He knows less of metaphysics than any decently honest man."
From this time on, the Eddys credited Mr. Arens with the same malicious intervention in their affairs with which they had already charged Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Spofford. As has been mentioned before, Mrs. Eddy believed that the mesmeric influence of each of these three men affected her differently, and that each operated upon her in a manner analogous to the effect of certain harmful drugs. The influence of Mr. Arens, she insisted, affected her like arsenic. Hence, when Mr. Eddy's ​health began to fail, she diagnosed his case as the result of Mr. Arens' mesmeric influence, or, as she expressed it, "arsenical poison, mentally administered." To say that Mr. Eddy believed in malicious mesmerism more sincerely than did his wife would perhaps be incorrect; but his was the more passive nature, and he had less power of reaction and recuperation. He was convinced that he was being slowly poisoned, and daily treated himself against Mr. Arens and his alliterative chemical equivalent.
When Mr. Eddy continued to grow steadily worse, Mrs. Eddy became alarmed, and sent for a regular physician. She called Dr. Rufus K. Noyes, then of Lynn, a graduate of the Dartmouth Medical School, and who has now for many years been a physician in Boston. Dr. Noyes found Mr. Eddy's case very simple, and told Mrs. Eddy that her husband was suffering from a common and very well-defined disease of the heart, and that he might die at any moment. He came to see Mr. Eddy twice after this, gave him advice as to diet, hygiene, and rest, and suggested the usual tonics for the heart and general system.
Mr. Eddy's death occurred on the morning of Saturday, June 3d, some hours before daybreak, and almost immediately Mrs. Eddy telegraphed Dr. Noyes to come up from Lynn and perform an autopsy. The autopsy was private, and was conducted at the widow's request. Dr. Noyes found that death had resulted from an organic disease of the heart, the aortic ​valve being destroyed and the surrounding tissues infiltrated with calcareous matter.
It is necessary to remember that, fantastic as the theory of poisoning by mental suggestion may sound, Mrs. Eddy thoroughly believed in it, and she considered her husband's death absolute proof of the power of malicious mesmerism to destroy life. Charles J. Eastman, who attended Mr. Eddy just before his death, agreed with Mrs. Eddy that the symptoms were those of arsenical poisoning, and she doubtless thought that the autopsy would corroborate this opinion. After the autopsy she still clung to her conviction, and, although Dr. Noyes actually took Mr. Eddy's heart into the room where she was and pointed out to her its defects, she still maintained that her husband had died from mental arsenic. On Monday she gave out the following interview:
My husband's death was caused by malicious mesmerism. Dr. C. J. Eastman, who attended the case after it had taken an alarming turn, declares the symptoms to be the same as those of arsenical poisoning. On the other hand, Dr. Rufus K. Noyes, late of the City Hospital, who held an autopsy over the body to-day, affirms that the corpse is free from all material poison, although Dr. Eastman still holds to his original belief. I know it was poison that killed him, not material poison, but mesmeric poison. My husband was in uniform health, and but seldom complained of any kind of ailment. During his brief illness, just preceding his death, his continual cry was, "Only relieve me of this continual suggestion, through the mind, of poison, and I will recover." It is well known that by constantly dwelling upon any subject in thought finally comes the poison of belief through the whole system. . . . I never saw a more self-possessed man than dear Dr. Eddy was. He said to Dr. Eastman, when he was finally called to attend him: "My case is nothing that I cannot attend to myself, although to me it acts the same as poison and seems to pervade my whole system just as that would."
This is not the first case known of where death has occurred from what appeared to be poison, and was so declared by the attending ​physician, but in which the body, on being thoroughly examined by an autopsy, was shown to possess no signs of material poison. There was such a case in New York. Every one at first declared poison to have been the cause of death, as the symptoms were all there; but an autopsy contradicted the belief, and it was shown that the victim had had no opportunity for procuring poison. I afterwards learned that she had been very active in advocating the merits of our college. Oh, isn't it terrible, that this fiend of malpractice is in the land! The only remedy that is effectual in meeting this terrible power possessed by the evil-minded is to counteract it by the same method that I use in counteracting poison. They require the same remedy. Circumstances debarred me from taking hold of my husband's case. He declared himself perfectly capable of carrying himself through, and I was so entirely absorbed in business that I permitted him to try, and when I awakened to the danger it was too late. I have cured worse cases before, but took hold of them in time. I don't think that Dr. Carpenter had anything to do with my husband's death, but I do believe it was the rejected students—students who were turned away from our college because of their unworthiness and immorality. To-day I sent for one of the students whom my husband had helped liberally, and given money, not knowing how unworthy he was. I wished him to come, that I might prove to him how, by metaphysics, I could show the cause of my husband's death. He was as pale as a ghost when he came to the door, and refused to enter, or to believe that I knew what caused his death. Within half an hour after he left, I felt the same attack that my husband felt—the same that caused his death. I instantly gave myself the same treatment that I would use in a case of arsenical poisoning, and so I recovered, just the same as I could have caused my husband to recover had I taken the case in time. After a certain amount of mesmeric poison has been administered it cannot be averted. No power of mind can resist it. It must be met with resistive action of the mind at the start, which will counteract it. We all know that disease of any kind cannot reach the body except through the mind, and that if the mind is cured the disease is soon relieved. Only a few days ago I disposed of a tumour in twenty-four hours that the doctors had said must be removed by the knife. I changed the course of the mind to counteract the effect of the disease. This proves the myth of matter. Mesmerism will make an apple burn the hand so that the child will cry. My husband never spoke of death as something we were to meet, but only as a phase of mortal belief. . . . I do believe in God's supremacy over error, and this gives me peace. I do believe, and have ​been told, that there is a price set upon my head. One of my students, a malpractitioner, has been heard to say that he would follow us to the grave. He has already reached my husband. While my husband and I were in Washington and Philadelphia last winter, we were obliged to guard against poison, the same symptoms apparent at my husband's death constantly attending us. And yet the one who was planning the evil against us was in Boston the whole time. To-day a lady, active in forwarding the good of our college, told me that she had been troubled almost constantly with arsenical poison symptoms, and is now treating them constantly as I directed her. Three days ago one of my patients died, and the doctor said he died from arsenic, and yet there were no material symptoms of poison.
The "Doctor" Eastman whom Mrs. Eddy quotes as corroborating her theory that Mr. Eddy died from arsenic was not a graduate of any medical school, nor is there any evidence that he had ever studied at one, though the then lax medical laws of Massachusetts did not prevent him from writing M.D. after his name. He was a director of Mrs. Eddy's college, and his name appeared in her curriculum as an authority to be consulted on instrumental surgery, which was not taught in her classes. He was also dean of the so-called "Bellevue Medical College," which was chartered under the same undiscriminating act under which Mrs. Eddy's college was chartered, and which was later reported as a fraudulent institution and closed.
In the Christian Science Journal, June, 1885, Mrs. Eddy thus explains Mr. Eastman's connection with her college, but neglects to say that he was one of the original directors:
Charles J. Eastman, M.D., was never a student of mine, and, to my knowledge, never claimed to be a Christian Scientist. At the time Mr. Rice alludes to he was a homeopathic physician and dean of the Bellevue ​Medical College. His name appeared in my curriculum as surgeon to be consulted outside, instrumental surgery not being taught in my college. His name has been removed from my curriculum. Such are the facts where with Rev. Mr. Rice would slander a religious sect.
    Mary B. G. Eddy,
    Prest. Massachusetts Metaphysical College.
Although a genial enough fellow personally, and a frequent caller at Mrs. Eddy's house, Eastman's "professional" record is almost incredibly sinister. His private practice was largely of a criminal nature, and at the time when Mrs. Eddy made him a director of her college he had already been indicted on a charge of performing a criminal operation. In 1890 he was again before the Grand Jury on a similar charge; and in 1893, upon a third charge (the patient having died from the effects of the operation), he was sentenced to five years in the State prison. Eastman served out his term, and died a few years after his release.
Eastman's assertion that he found traces of arsenic in Mr. Eddy's body was absolutely valueless as a medical opinion.
Mr. Eddy's funeral services were held at the house in Columbus Avenue, after which his remains were taken to Tilton, N. H., by Mr. George D. Choate, and interred in the Baker family lot, Mrs. Eddy herself remaining in Boston. On the following Sunday, Mrs. Clara Choate preached a eulogistic funeral sermon before the Christian Science congregation—still a small body of less than fifty members. Mr. Eddy, indeed, died upon the eve of the determining epoch in his wife's career, and could have had no conception of the ultimate influence and extent of the movement which bears his name.
Some time after Mr. Eddy's death, his wife wrote a colloquy in verse, which she called "Meeting of my Departed Mother ​and Husband," in which she expressed confidence in their blessed state and in her own future.
In this dialogue the mother, Abigail Baker, asks of Mr. Eddy:
Bearest them no tidings from our loved on earth, The toiler tireless for Truth's new birth, All unbeguiled? Our joy is gathered from her parting sigh: This hour looks on her heart with pitying eye,— What of my child?
To this Mr. Eddy replies:
When severed by death's dream, I woke to life: She deemed I died, and could not hear my strife At first to fill That waking with a love that steady turns To God; a hope that ever upward yearns, Bowed to his will.   Years had passed o'er thy broken household band When angels beckoned me to this bright land, With thee to meet. She that has wept o'er me, kissed thy cold brow, Rears the sad marble to our memory now In lone retreat.   By the remembrance of her earthly life, And parting prayer, I only know my wife, Thy child, shall come,— Where farewells cloud not o'er our ransomed rest,— Hither to reap, with all the crowned and blest, Of bliss the sum.
Many of Mrs. Eddy's students, as well as Mrs. Eddy herself, disregarded the evidence of the autopsy, and believed that Mr. Eddy had died from mesmeric poison rather than from a disease of the heart. Every new movement has its extremists, and ​Christian Science was then so young that all sorts of extravagant hopes were cherished among its enthusiasts. More than one dreamer fervently believed that the grave was at last to be cheated of its victory. In any case, Mr. Eddy's death was regarded as a blow to the movement, but, since they believed that the bodily organs were impotent to contribute to either health or disease except as they were influenced by the belief of the patient, it was much less discouraging to feel that Mr. Eddy had died from the shafts of the enemy than from a simple defect of the heart-valves. In the one case, his death was a stimulus, a call to action; in the other, it was an impeachment of Mr. Eddy's growth in Science, an indication that he had not entirely got beyond the belief in the efficacy of the organs of the body. Explained as the work of animal magnetism, Mr. Eddy's death, which might otherwise have been a blow to his wife professionally, was made to confirm one of her favourite doctrines. It was upon the subject of malicious mesmerism that many of her students had differed from her and fallen away, and even the loyal found it the most difficult of her doctrines to accept. Here, in Mr. Eddy's death, was absolute evidence of what mesmerism might accomplish.
The hour had come when Mrs. Eddy needed all her friends about her. Arthur T. Buswell was still in Cincinnati, where he had been sent as a path-finder two years before. After Mrs. Eddy's tart reply when he wrote to her asking financial aid, their correspondence practically ceased until Mr. Eddy's illness, when she sent him a request to give her husband absent treatments. One day he received a telegram which said merely: "Come to 569 Columbus Avenue immediately." He accordingly ​gave up his position as Superintendent of Public Charities, and started at once for Boston. When he arrived at 569 Columbus Avenue, he found Mr. Eddy dead in the house, and Mrs. Eddy surrounded by half a dozen faithful students, and almost frantic from fear. She declared that mesmerism had broken down her every defence, that her students were powerless to treat against it, and that she herself was at last prostrated. Twice, she said, she had resuscitated her husband from the power which was strangling him, but the third time her strength was exhausted. Mesmerism was submerging them, and she felt that she was barely keeping her own head above water. She was afraid to go out of the house, and afraid to stay in it. This was the end, she told her faithful women; undoubtedly she would speedily follow her husband. The light of truth was to be put out, and the world would begin again its dreary vigil of centuries.
But, although beset by grief and fear, Mrs. Eddy did not abandon herself to lamentation. On the contrary, she sat almost constantly at her desk, writing press notices and newspaper interviews upon the subject of her husband's death. Mrs. Eddy, indeed, is never so commanding a figure as when she bestirs herself in the face of calamity. She gave way to fear and dread only in the short intervals when she laid aside her driven pen for rest, and her best energies were concentrated upon how she should present to the public this misfortune which, if wrongly understood, might be used as an effective argument against Christian Science, and might retard her advancement in a new field.
Soon after her husband's death, Mrs. Eddy, attended by ​Mr. Buswell and Miss Alice Sibley, went to Mr. Buswell's old home at Barton, Vt., to spend the remainder of the summer. Mr. Buswell asserts that Mrs. Eddy was in an excessively nervous and exhausted condition, approaching nervous prostration, and that he was called up night after night to treat her for those hysterical attacks from which she was never entirely free. But, however ill she might have been the night before, each day found her planning for the future of her church and college, arranging for lectures to be given by her students, looking about for new practitioners, and tirelessly devising means to extend the movement. She knew that a practical reconstruction of her household would now be necessary, and began casting about in her mind for such of her students as could be counted upon to devote themselves unreservedly to her service. In one of her selections, certainly, she was not mistaken. On the day they started back to Boston, Mrs. Eddy asked Mr. Buswell to telegraph Calvin A. Frye, a young machinist of Lawrence, Mass., who had lately studied with her, to meet them at Plymouth, N. H. One is tempted to wonder what Mr. Frye would have done, when this message reached him, had he known of what it was to be the beginning. From the day he joined Mrs. Eddy at Plymouth, and returned to Boston with her, he has never left her. Having entered Mrs. Eddy's service at the age of thirty-seven, he is now a man of sixty-four, and is still at his post.
For twenty-seven years Mr. Frye has occupied an anomalous position in Mrs. Eddy's household. He has been her house-steward, bookkeeper, and secretary. When he attends her upon her ceremonial drives in Concord, he wears the livery of ​a footman. In a letter to her son, George Glover, written April 27, 1898, Mrs. Eddy describes Mr. Frye as her "man-of-all-work." Since Mrs. Eddy's retirement to Concord eighteen years ago, Calvin Frye has lived in an isolation almost as complete as her own, the object of surmises and insinuations. He has no personal friends outside of the walls of Pleasant View, and the oft-repeated assertion that in twenty-seven years he has not been beyond Mrs. Eddy's call for twenty-four hours is perhaps literally true. Although her treatment of him has often been contemptuous in the extreme, his fidelity has been invaluable to Mrs. Eddy; but the actual donning of livery by a middle-aged man of some education and of sturdy, independent New England ancestry, is a difficult thing to understand. Whether he feels the grave charges which have recently been brought against him, or the ridicule of which he has long been the object, it is not likely that any one will ever learn from Mr. Frye. Whatever his motives and experiences, they are securely hidden behind an impassive countenance and a long-confirmed habit of silence.
Calvin A. Frye was born August 24, 1845, in Frye Village, which is now a part of Andover, Mass., and which was formerly called Frye's Mills, as it was a settlement which had grown up about the saw-mill and grist-mill of Enoch Frye II., Calvin Frye's grandfather. The Fryes were an old American family, and their ancestors had taken part in the War of the Revolution and the War of 1812. Calvin Frye's father, Enoch Frye III., was born in the last year of the eighteenth century. After preparing himself in the Phillips Andover Academy, he entered Harvard University, and was graduated in 1821, with that ​famous class to which belonged Ralph Waldo Emerson, Samuel Hatch, Edward Loring, and Francis Cabot. The members of this class, before their graduation, agreed to hold a reunion every year for fifty years, and Enoch Frye was present at the fiftieth and last reunion of his class at Cambridge in 1871.
After leaving college, Enoch Frye taught for a short time as assistant master in one of the Boston schools. In 1823 he returned to Andover. While still a young man he had a long illness which left him incurably lame and partially in capacitated him. After his recovery he kept a small grocery-store. He married Lydia Barnard, and they had four children, of whom Calvin was the third. While the children were still very young, the mother became insane, and, with the exception of lucid intervals of short duration, she was insane until her death at an advanced age. She was twice placed in an asylum, but, upon her return from her second stay there, she begged her family not to send her away again, and for twelve years thereafter she was the charge of her widowed daughter, Lydia Roaf.
* ↑ Acts and Resolves passed by the General Court of Massachusetts, 1874, Chapter 375, Section 2: "Such association may be entered into for any educational, charitable, benevolent, or religious purpose; for the prosecution of any antiquarian, historical, literary, scientific, medical, artistic, monumental, or musical purposes," etc., etc. This Chapter 375 was later merged into Chapter 115 of the Public Statutes.
* ↑ Mrs. Eddy states that her husband taught two terms in her college, that her adopted son, E. J. Foster Eddy, taught one term, and that Erastus N. Bates taught one class.
* ↑ Only the year before, Mrs. Eddy had expressed herself strongly against post-mortem examinations: "A metaphysician never gives medicine, recommends or trusts in hygiene, or believes in the ocular or the post-mortem examination of patients." Science and Health (1881), Vol. I., p. 269. "Many a hopeless case of disease is induced by a single post-mortem examination," Science and Health (1881), Vol. I., p. 163.
* ↑ Boston Post, June 5, 1882.
* ↑ Dr. Carpenter was a well-known mesmerist who used to give public exhibitions in Boston.
* ↑ Although Mrs. Eddy usually attributed her husband's death to Mr. Arens' mesmeric influence, she sometimes mentioned Richard Kennedy as his accomplice.
* ↑ The Rev. Mr. Rice, a former member of the Massachusetts legislature, had written some newspaper articles against the issue of medical diplomas by Mrs. Eddy's college.
Photograph by Notman Photo Company :
CALVIN A. FRYE
From a photograph taken about 1882
​Each of Enoch Frye's children learned a trade, and Calvin, after attending the public school in Andover, was apprenticed as a machinist in Davis & Furber's machine-shops in North Andover. He worked there until he joined Mrs. Eddy in 1882. He was a good machinist, and left a steady and fairly remunerative employment to follow her. When he was twenty-six years old, Calvin married Miss Ada E. Brush of Lowell, who was visiting in Lawrence, and who attended the same church. She lived but one year, and after her death Calvin went back ​to his father's house—the family had moved to Lawrence in the early '60's.
The Fryes were all calm, slow, and inarticulate. They kept to themselves, both in Andover and in Lawrence, and never went anywhere except to the Congregational Church, of which they all were members. In their church relations they were as quiet and unassertive as in their secular life. They went to service regularly, but evinced no special interest in the church. Indeed, their solitary manner of life seemed to come about from a general lack of interest in people and affairs, and they stayed at home not so much because of an absorbing family life as because they felt no impulse to stir about the world. The men were all good mechanics, regular and steady in their habits; Lydia, the daughter, was patient, industrious, and self-sacrificing. As a family, the Fryes were long-lived. Enoch III. lived from 1799 to 1886. His brother Andrew, now living, is between ninety-five and ninety-six years old, and a sister also lived to a great age. Careful, regular living and a systematic avoidance of any excitement long preserved the Fryes in health of mind and body. Certainly the forbears of Calvin Frye had done their best to sheathe his nerves for the uneasy office to which he was to be called and chosen.
Calvin and Lydia Frye first became interested in Christian Science through their sister-in-law, Mrs. Oscar Frye. Mrs. Clara Choate, a prominent healer in the Boston church, was called to treat the insane mother, whom the family believed was benefited by the treatments. Calvin took a course of instruction under Mrs. Eddy, after which both he and Lydia practised a little. After Calvin joined Mrs. Eddy in Boston, Lydia ​followed him, and for some time did Mrs. Eddy's housework. Returning ill to Lawrence, she underwent a severe surgical operation, and at last died in reduced circumstances at the home of a relative. Lydia was an ardent Christian Scientist, and almost until the day she died stoutly declared that she "did not believe in death."
From the day Calvin Frye entered the service of Mrs. Eddy, he lived in literal accordance with the suggestion of that passage in Science and Health where Mrs. Eddy reminds us that Jesus acknowledged no family ties and bade us call no man father. Mrs. Eddy demanded of her followers all that they had to give, and Mr. Frye, certainly, complied with her demand. When his father, Enoch Frye III., died, on April 22, 1886, four years after the son had entered Mrs. Eddy's service, Calvin went down to Lawrence to attend the funeral, but his precipitate haste indicated a short leave of absence. On the way to the cemetery he stopped the carriage and boarded a street-car bound for the railway-station, in order to catch the next train back to Boston. By the time his sister Lydia died, four years later, Calvin had become so completely absorbed in his new life and duties that he did not acknowledge the notification of her death, did not go to her funeral, and did not respond to a request for a small amount of money to help defray the burial expenses. For him family ties no longer existed, and death had become merely a belief.