Long before her marriage, when indeed but a young girl, Mary Nelson Diven [Calvin’s mother] heard an appeal for the Sandwich Islands made by the elder Dr. Forbes, one of the early missionaries of the American Board, to those islands. He asked for a box of supplies. There was not much missionary interest in the little church of Dillsburg, York County, Pennsylvania, of which she was a member; for the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions had not been organized, and the American Board had not attained its majority. Her pastor sympathized with the newly awakened zeal and interest of his young parishioner, when she proposed to canvass the congregation in response to Dr. Forbes’s appeal. The box was secured and sent. This was the seed that germinated in her heart so early and bore fruit through the whole of her long life. When in her nineteenth year she was married to John Mateer, hers was a marriage in the Lord; and together she and her husband consecrated their children in their infancy to his service. This consecration was not a form; they were laid upon the altar and never taken back. Through all the self-denying struggles to secure their education, one aim was steadily kept in view, that of fitting them either to carry the gospel to some heathen land, or to do the Lord’s work in their own land. In addition to the foreign missionary periodicals, a number of biographies of foreign missionaries were secured and were read by all the family. Not only did this mother try to awaken in her children an interest in missions through missionary literature, but she devised means to strengthen and make permanent this interest, to furnish channels through which these feelings and impulses might flow toward practical results. One of these was a missionary mite box which she fashioned with her own hands, away back in the early forties, before the mite boxes had been scattered broadcast in the land. Quaint indeed it was, this plain little wooden box, covered with small-figured wall paper. Placed upon the parlor mantel, it soon became the shrine of the children’s devotion. No labor or self-denial on their part was considered too great to secure pennies for “the missionary box.” Few pennies were spent for self-indulgence after that box was put in place, and overflowing was the delight when some unwonted good fortune made it possible to drop in silver coins—“six-and-a-fourth bits,” or “eleven-penny bits.” Most of the offerings were secured by such self-denials as foregoing coffee, sugar, or butter. There was not at that time much opportunity for country children to earn even pennies. The “red-letter” day of all the year was when the box was opened and the pennies were counted.