up their children with a great deal of care.  They were in every respect dissimilar.  He was tall, thin, and dark-complexioned; she was almost short, very fair, and portly in appearance.  Mr. Meeker was a kind-hearted, generous, unambitious man, who loved his home and his children, and rejoiced when he could see every body happy around him.  He was neither close nor calculating.  With a full share of natural ability, he did not turn his talents to accumulation, quite content if he made the ends of the year meet.

Mrs. Meeker was a woman who never took a step from impulse.  She had a motive for every act of her life.  Exceedingly acute in her judgments of people, she brought her shrewdness to bear on all occasions.  She was a capital housekeeper, a most excellent manager, a pattern wife and mother.  I say, ‘pattern wife and mother,’ for she was devoted to her husband’s interests, which, to be sure, were equally her own; she made every thing very comfortable for him indoors, and she managed expenditures with an economy and closeness which Mr. Meeker was quite incapable of.  She looked after her children with unremitting care.  They were sent to better schools, and their associations were of a better description than those of her neighbors.  She took personal pains with their religious culture.  Although they were sent to Sunday-school, she herself taught them the Catechism, the Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Sermon on the Mount, beside a great variety of Gospel hymns and Bible-stories.  But along with these excellent teachings they were taught—­what is apt to be taught in almost every family, to almost every child—­to regard appearances, to make the best possible show to the world, to seem what they ought to be; apparently a sort of short-cut to goodness, but really a turnpike erected by the devil, which leads any where rather than to the desired point.  Mrs. Meeker was a religious woman, scrupulous and exact in every outward observance; in this respect severe with herself and with all around her.  Yet this never prevented her having an eye to the ‘main chance,’ which was, to get on in the world.  Indeed, to attempt to do so, was with her a fundamental duty.  She loved to pray the Lord to bless ‘our basket and our store.’  She dwelt much on the promise of ‘a hundred-fold’ in this world in addition to the ‘inheritance of everlasting life.’  She could repeat all the practical maxims which abound in the book of Proverbs, and she was careful, when she feared her husband was about to give way to a generous impulse in favor of a poor relation or neighbor, to put him in mind of his own large and increasing household, solemnly cautioning him that he who looked not well after it, was ‘worse than an infidel.’  In short, being fully convinced by application of her natural shrewd sense that religion was the safest thing for her here and hereafter, she became religious.  In her piety there was manifested but one idea—­self.  Whatever she did, was from a sense of duty, and she did her duty because it was the way to prosperity and heaven.