● ● ●  early version of her poem “Christ, my Refuge,” published in a local paper in August, she felt it necessary to disavow any use of mediumship:

I am no reed to shake at scorn,
       Or from it flee,
I am no medium but Truth’s, to warn
       The Pharisee.⁹⁹

Before either the advertisement or the poem appeared in print, a sudden change took place in Mrs. Glover’s life. The Websters’ grandchildren came from New York each summer to live in the big Amesbury house, preceded by their father, William R. Ellis, who, according to the later account by one of his daughters, would come up in advance “in order to clear my grandmother’s house of broken-down Spiritualists and sick persons.”¹⁰⁰ Since Mrs. Glover’s presence interfered with his vacation plans for the children, she was ordered to leave. When she was unable to find another place to go, he took the drastic step of turning her and her trunk out of the house on a dark and stormy night and locking the door after her.

With her went two other guests, either from sympathy with her or because they were similarly ejected. One of them, nineteen-year-old Richard Kennedy, was to play an important role in the drama of her life. The other, a Mrs. Richardson, guided her down the street to the home of Miss Sarah Bagley and then disappears from the story.

Miss Bagley was what used to be known as a New England gentlewoman in reduced circumstances. She might have been an additional spinster sister in The House of the Seven Gables or have come out of one of Mary Wilkins Freeman’s stories. Supporting herself by her needle, she maintained an apple-pie order in her attractive little house, with its braided rugs and flowered quilts and gleaming copper and brass. Very willingly she took in Mrs. Glover and gave her a diminutive but  ● ● ●