ort:

"On assuming my duties as publisher, there was not a dollar in the
treasury; but on the contrary the Society owed unpaid printing and
paper bills to the amount of several hundred dollars, not to mention
a contingent liability of many more hundreds"--represented by
advance--subscriptions paid for the Journal and the "Series," the which
goods Mrs. Eddy had not delivered. And couldn't, very well, perhaps, on
a Metaphysical College income of but a few thousand dollars a day, or a
week, or whatever it was in those magnificently flourishing times. The
struggling Journal had swallowed up those advance-payments, but its
"claim" was a severe one and they had failed to cure it. But Nixon cured
it in his diligent three years, and joyously reported the news that he
had cleared off all the debts and now had a fat six thousand dollars in
the bank.

It made Mrs. Eddy's mouth water.

At the time that Mrs. Eddy had unloaded that dismal gift on to her
National Association, she had followed her inveterate custom: she had
tied a string to its hind leg, and kept one end of it hitched to her
belt. We have seen her do that in the case of the Boston Mosque. When
she deeds property, she puts in that string-clause. It provides that
under certain conditions she can pull the string and land the property
in the cherished home of its happy youth. In the present case she
believed that she had made provision that if at any time the National
Christian Science Association should dissolve itself by a formal vote,
she could pull.

A year after Nixon's handsome report, she writes the Association that
she has a "unique request to lay before it." It has dissolved, and she
is not quite sure that the Christian Science Journal has "already fallen
into her hands" by that act, though it "seems" to her to have met with
that accident; so she would like to have the matter decided by a formal
vote. But whether there is a doubt or not, "I see the wisdom," she says,
"of again owning this Christian Science waif."

I think that that is unassailable evidence that the waif was making
money, hands down.

She pulled her gift in. A few years later she donated the Publishing
Society, along with its real estate, its buildings, its plant, its
publications, and its money--the whole worth twenty--two thousand
dollars, and free of debt--to--Well, to the Mother-Church!

That is to say, to herself. There is an act count of it in the Christian
Science Journal, and of ho