By reading the records that have been at my command I have gotten the conviction that the mother was the stronger character, or at least that she more deeply impressed herself on the children. When Calvin made his last visit to this country, he was asked whose influence had been most potent in his life, and he at once replied, “Mother’s.” In his personal appearance he strongly resembled her. If one could have wished for any change in his character, it might have been that he should have had in it just a little bit more of the ideality of his father, and just a little bit less of the intense realism of his mother. Some of his mother’s most evident characteristics were in a measure traceable as an inheritance from her father, William Diven; for example, the place to which she assigned education among the values of life. He was a man of considerable literary attainments, for his day, and for one residing out in the country; so that when in later years he came to make his home with the Mateers he brought with him a collection of standard books, thus furnishing additional and substantial reading for the family. Even Shakspere and Burns were among the authors, though they were not placed where the children could have access to them, and were made familiar to them only by the grandfather’s quotation of choice passages. When his daughter was a little girl, so intense was his desire that she should have as good an education as practicable, that if the weather was too inclement for her to walk to the schoolhouse he used to carry her on his back. It was her lifelong regret that her education was so defective; and it is said that after she was seventy years of age, once she dreamed that she was sent to school at Mount Holyoke, and she awoke in tears to find that she was white-haired, and that it was only a dream. Although it involved the sacrifice of her own strength and ease, she never faltered in her determination that her children should have the educational advantages to which she had aspired, but never attained; and in what they reached in this direction she had a rich satisfaction. Toward every other object which she conceived to be good and true, and to be within the scope of her life, she set herself with like persistence, and strength, and willingness for self-sacrifice. Her piety was deep, thorough and all-controlling; but with her it was a principle rather than a sentiment. Its chief aim was the promotion of the glory of the infinitely holy God, though as she neared the visible presence of her Saviour, this softened somewhat into a conscious love and faith toward him. She survived her husband twenty-one years, and died at the advanced age of seventy-nine. When the tidings of this came to her children in China, their chief lament was, “How we shall miss her prayers!”