Besides her Boston home, Mrs. Eddy has a delightful country home one mile from the State House of New Hampshire’s quiet capital, an easy driving distance for her when she wishes to catch a glimpse of the world.  But for the most part she lives very much retired, driving rather into the country, which is so picturesque all about Concord and its surrounding villages.

The big house, so delightfully remodelled and modernized from a primitive homestead that nothing is left excepting the angles and pitch of the roof, is remarkably well placed upon a terrace that slopes behind the buildings, while they themselves are in the midst of green stretches of lawns, dotted with beds of flowering shrubs, with here and there a fountain or summer-house.

Mrs. Eddy took the writer straight to her beloved “lookout”—­a broad piazza on the south side of the second story of the house, where she can sit in her swinging chair, revelling in the lights and shades of spring and summer greenness.  Or, as just then, in the gorgeous October coloring of the whole landscape that lies below, across the farm, which stretches on through an intervale of beautiful meadows and pastures to the woods that skirt the valley of the little truant river, as it wanders eastward.

It pleased her to point out her own birthplace.  Straight as the crow flies, from her piazza, does it lie on the brow of Bow hill, and then she paused and reminded the reporter that Congressman Baker from New Hampshire, her cousin, was born and bred in that same neighborhood.  The photograph of Hon. Hoke Smith, another distinguished relative, adorned the mantel.

Then my eye caught her family coat of arms and the diploma given her by the Society of the Daughters of the Revolution.

The natural and lawful pride that comes with a tincture of blue and brave blood, is perhaps one of her characteristics, as is many another well-born woman’s.  She had a long list of worthy ancestors in Colonial and Revolutionary days, and the McNeils and General Knox figure largely in her genealogy, as well as the hero who killed the ill-starred Paugus.

This big, sunny room which Mrs. Eddy calls her den—­or sometimes “Mother’s room,” when speaking of her many followers who consider her their spiritual Leader—­has the air of hospitality that marks its hostess herself.  Mrs. Eddy has hung its walls with reproductions of some of Europe’s masterpieces, a few of which had been the gifts of her loving pupils.

Looking down from the windows upon the tree-tops on the lower terrace, the reporter exclaimed:  “You have lived here only four years, and yet from a barren waste of most unpromising ground has come forth all this beauty!”

“Four years!” she ejaculated; “two and a half, only two and a half years.”  Then, touching my sleeve and pointing, she continued:  “Look at those big elms!  I had them brought here in warm weather, almost as big as they are now, and not one died.”