After an interval of five years, each month of which furnished material for a chapter by itself, I started on my way home from Peru; to save, if possible, the life of my wife who for six months had been very low, and under the doctor's care. On my arrival, I found her much lower than I had supposed; and the consultation of physicians, immediately secured, only made it apparent that she could not live long. In anxiety and distress I then added my own knowledge of medicine,—of necessity quite good to have enabled me so many years properly to care for both passengers and crews. This also failing to prove of use, my extremity was reached, and God's opportunity arrived.
One evening as I was sitting hopeless at my wife's bedside, a lady friend called and asked: "Captain, why don't you get a Christian Scientist to treat your wife?" To my inquiry as to what that was, she replied that she did not know, but had heard that they healed many cases without medicine. "Anything that will heal my wife I will get, if it takes all I own in the world," I replied.
In the room, at the time, was my nephew who also was under medical treatment. At close of the lady's call he exclaimed: "Uncle, if Christian Science is good for Manie, it must be good for me too!" I assented, and in a day or two his wife took him (he could not see his way) to a Scientist, under whose treatment he at once placed himself. His teeth, salivated by free use of mercurial remedies, had restricted him entirely to the use of spoon-diet; but, on his return from the first treatment, he gritted them together and exclaimed: "There, Uncle! I can eat something now." This renewed my determination to look into the matter, in spite of my wife's protests and fears that it was spiritualism. Accordingly, I accompanied him on his next visit to the Scientist's and myself had a talk with the healer.
