“My father was self-educated,” said Mr. Quimby, “but he had read a great deal. His head was full of speculative ideas and he was constantly writing down his thoughts. He wrote without capitalizing or punctuating. His mind was always ahead of his pen, and he would not paragraph or formulate his thoughts into essays. I guess many of his words were misspelled too.”
If the son cherished and guarded the papers containing his father’s original notes, there must have been some more sufficient reason, which he alone knew, why he so long withheld them from publicity. He for years refused to submit them for inspection to any person competent or incompetent to judge of their value. Under the most urgent demand he failed to bring them forth into the light, to allow a friend in dire need to use them in defence in a suit at law, or to permit a distinguished scholar to prepare a brief in their interest. Literary men, lawyers, and journalists have urged their exhibition in vain. In 1887 Mrs. Eddy
copies of things my father wrote. He used to write at odd moments on scraps of paper whatever came into his mind.”
“And have you those papers now?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Will you let me see a few pages of them?”
“No, I will not. No one has seen them and no one shall. … I tell you they have all been after them, Arens, Dresser, Minot J. Savage, Peabody, and these recent newspaper and magazine investigators. But I have never shown them. Dr. Savage wrote me that I owed it to the world to produce them.”
“And did you not think so?”
“No. I have said I will never print them while that woman lives.”
“Do you mean Mrs. Eddy?”
“That is just who I mean.”
—Human Life, April, 1907.
