The portrait was absurdly striking. The Yankee Pecksniff was good-looking after his kind, which was the dark-eyed, well-featured, serenely-sanctimonious type. He wore his hair longer than most laymen cut theirs, and it curled naturally. His voice was low and even, with the pulpitine cadences hit off, and at, cleverly by Doctor Holmes as “a tone supposed by the speaker to be peculiarly pleasing to the Almighty.” His smile was sweet, his gait was felinely dignified, and a pervasive aroma of meekness tempered his daily walk and conversation. His wife, “Aunt Betsy,” was the saintliest soul that ever rated herself as the least important of God’s creatures, and cared with motherly tenderness for everything else her Creator brought within her modest sphere of action. In all the years of our intimate association I never saw her out of temper or heard a harsh word from the lips in which nestled and abode the law of kindness. She brought him a tidy little slice of her father’s estate, which he husbanded wisely. He was economical to parsimony, and contrived to imbue wife and children with a lively sense of the need of saving in every conceivable way “against a rainy day.” At ten years of age I asked my mother, point-blank, what salary the church paid Uncle Carus. She answered as directly: “Three hundred dollars a year. But he has property of his own.” Whereupon, without the slightest idea of being pert, I remarked, “If we were to get a _really_ good preacher, I suppose he would have to be paid more.” And my mother responded as simply: “No doubt. But your Uncle Carus is a very faithful pastor.” I put no questions, but I pondered in my heart the purport of a dialogue I got in snatches while reading on the back porch one afternoon, when a good-hearted neighbor and my mother were talking of the school to be opened in the village under the tuition of Cousin Paulina, the eldest daughter of Aunt Betsy and her second husband. She was now in her eighteenth year, a graduate of a somewhat noted “female” seminary, decidedly pretty, with a quick temper and a talent for teaching. “It is a pity,” said the friendly visitor, “to tie her down to a school-room when she is just at the age when girls like to see company and go round with other young people. It isn’t as if they were obliged to put her to work.” My mother replied discreetly, yet I detected a sympathetic tone in her speech. The talk came into my mind many a time after the sessions of the school began, and I saw, through the window, young men and girls walking, riding, and driving past, the girls in their prettiest attire, the young men gallantly attentive, and all enjoying the gala-time of life that comes but once to any of us. If the dark-eyed, serious, eighteen-year-old teacher felt the deprivation, she never murmured. I think her mother had taught her, with her first word and trial-step, to believe that her “father knew best.”