Mrs. Meeker had been a church-member from the time she was fourteen years old.  There was an extensive revival throughout the country at that period, and she, with a large number of young people of both sexes, were, or thought they were, converted.  She used to speak of this circumstance very often to her children, especially when any one of them approached the age which witnessed, to use her own language, ’her resignation of the pomps and vanities of life, and her dedication to the service of her Saviour.’  Still, notwithstanding her prayers and painstaking, not one of them had ever been under ‘conviction of sin;’ at least, none had ever manifested that agony and mental suffering which she considered necessary to a genuine change of heart.  She mourned much over such a state of things in her household.  What a scandal that not one of her children should give any evidences of saving grace!  What a subject for reproach in the mouths of the ungodly!  But it was not her fault; no, she often felt that Mr. Meeker was too lax in discipline, (she had had fears of him, sometimes, lest he might become a castaway,) and did not set that Christian example, at all times, which she could desire.  For instance, after church on Sunday afternoon, it was his custom, when the season was favorable, frequently with a child holding each hand, to walk leisurely over his fields, humming a cheerful hymn and taking note of whatever was pleasant in the scene, perhaps the fresh vegetation just bursting into life, or the opening flowers, or it might be the maturing fruit, or the ripening yellow grain.  On these occasions, he would endeavor to impress on his children how good God was; how seed-time and harvest always came; how the sun shone on the evil as well as on the good, and the rain descended both on the just and on the unjust.  He, too, would inculcate lessons of diligence and industry, agreeable lessons, after quite a different model from those of his wife.  He would repeat, for example, not in an austere fashion, but in a way which interested and even amused them, the dramatic description of the sluggard, from the hook of Proverbs, commencing: 

’I went by the field of the slothful, and by the vineyard of the man, void of understanding;

’And lo! it was all grown over with thorns, and nettles had covered the face thereof, and the stone wall thereof was broken down.’_

It is a memorable fact that Hiram was never in the habit of accompanying his father on these Sunday-excursions.  Not that his mother positively interdicted him.  She was too judicious a person to hold up to censure any habitual act of her husband, whatever might have been her own opinion, or however she might have remonstrated with him in private.  She had no difficulty in keeping Hiram by her side on Sunday afternoons, and the little fellow seemed instinctively to appreciate why.  Indeed, I doubt if the green fields and pleasant meadow, with the pretty brook running through it, had any charms for him even then.  At any rate, he was satisfied with his mother’s reason, that it was not good for him; he had better stay at home with her.