life of your child; she will be so deformed it were better she were dead.”  I could not feel this way.  After being at death’s door for nine days, she began to recover.  The wound in her face healed up to a hole about the size of a twenty-five cent piece.  Her jaws closed and remained so for eight years.  The sickness of my daughter and the keeping up of the hotel was such a tax on my mind, that for six months all transactions would recede from my memory.  For instance, if anyone told me something, in an hour afterwards, I could not tell whether it had been hours, days or months since it was told me.  I never entirely recovered from this, still being forgetful of names, dates and circumstances, unless they are particularly impressed upon my mind.  When I could afford it, I took my child, then twelve years old, down to Galveston, put her under the care of Dr. Dowell for the purpose of closing the hole in her cheek.  I had to leave the little one down there among strangers, for I could not afford to stay with her.  A mother only will know what this means.  After four operations the place was closed up in her cheek, still her mouth was closed, her teeth close together.  I suffered torture all these years for fear she might strangle to death.  I took her to San Antonio, Texas, to Dr. Herff, and he and his two sons removed a section of the jawbone, expecting to make an artificial joint, enabling her to use the other side of her jaw.  After all this, the operation was a failure, and her jaws closed up again.  We, in the meantime, moved to Richmond from Columbia.  We became very successful in the hotel business and I saved money enough to send her to New York City, where her father, Dr. Gloyd, had a cousin, Dr. Messinger, who would see that she had the best relief possible.  None of the surgeons there gave her any hope of opening her jaws.  She went to Dr. John Wyeth to have him perform the plastic surgery; that is, he cut off a flap from under her chin, turning it over the scar on her cheek.

Although Charlien was not a Christian, she had faith in God.  Once she complained of my being too strict with her, but said:  “Mamma I owe it to you that I have any faith in God, even if you are severe with me.”  She always believed that her mother had a God.  Finding no physician in New York that could open her jaws, she wrote me this:  “No one but God can open my mouth, Mamma; ask him to do it.”  There was a Catholic woman, Miss Doregan, who boarded with me and had a store around the corner from the hotel, and I could think of no one else who had as much faith as this woman.  She said she believed that God would heal my child according to prayer, so I went for seven mornings before breakfast to this saint of God.  She taught me many holy truths and she explained the Scriptures to me.  I learned from her a prayer that we said in concert, that was written by one of the Old Fathers, and is one of the most complete in devotion I have ever read.  I will record it here: