This young lady was married to his eldest son Horace, then twenty-six years old. The young couple lived elsewhere, but Horace sometimes helped his father in his cobbling business, although on the whole he preferred to let his wife earn a living for both of them. Horace was the sort of jovial ne’er-do-well who loves to play embarrassing practical jokes on respected citizens, thereby earning the appreciative guffaws of the boys at the corner.

Mrs. Sally Wentworth, Alanson’s wife, was a practical New England housewife of even temper, devoted to her family, and supplementing their income by her own earnings as a “rubbing doctor”—something between a magnetic healer and a masseuse. She was said to have a natural instinct for helping the sick and was always to be found wherever there was illness.

The three Wentworth children living at home were Celia, twenty, a delicate, clinging girl, Charles, seventeen, a cheerful mild boy, and Lucy, thirteen, impressionable and impulsively affectionate. They formed a pleasant enough household in a simple village community where life fell naturally into a series of Rogers-group patterns. But with the advent of Mrs. Glover something entirely outside the usual patterns entered their lives.

It was Hiram Crafts who had first brought her over to visit them when she was living at East Stoughton. Lucy Wentworth later wrote, “When Hiram Crafts brought her to our fireside, we just felt as if an angel had come into our house.”¹¹⁴ Alanson Wentworth was immediately charmed by her interpretation of the Bible. Subsequently Mrs. Glover healed him of the sciatica which had crippled him for years and of his “inveterate” habit of smoking and chewing tobacco. Celia’s health greatly improved, and the whole family with the exception of the scoffing Horace and his straightlaced wife promptly fell in love with her.

Describing her as she was at that time, Lucy wrote: