Converted when she was but five years old, and scarcely remembering the time when she did not go with her joys and sorrows to God in prayer, and next to the oldest in a family of ten children, her mother a widow, and all dependent upon the grandfather, she early learned that patience, self-control, efficiency, and unselfishness that characterized her through life and left in her old home at Nutplains, as Mrs. Stowe tells us, traditions like these: “Your mother never spoke an angry word in her life.” “Your mother never told a lie.” And from the husband such a testimony as this: “She experienced resignation, if any one ever did. I never saw the like, so entire, without reservation or shadow of turning. In no exigency was she taken by surprise. She was just there, quiet as an angel from above. I never heard a murmur; and if ever there was a perfect mind as respects submission, it was hers. I never witnessed a movement of the least degree of selfishness; and if there ever was any such thing in the world as disinterestedness, she had it.” No one reading her history will think that Henry Ward exaggerated when, speaking of her and her influence upon him, he said: “There are few born into this world that are her equals. She was a woman of extraordinary graces and gifts; a woman not demonstrative, with a profound philosophical nature, of a wonderful depth of affection, and with a serenity that was simply charming. From her I received my love of the beautiful, my poetic temperament; from her also I received simplicity and childlike faith in God.” And again: “My communion with nature arose from the mother in me. Because my mother was an inspired woman, who saw God in nature as really as in the Book, and she bestowed that temperament upon me, and I came gradually to feel that, aside from God as revealed in the past, there was a God with an everlasting present around about me.”