Some spoke of the absence of healthy interests, of the need for games, a need which appealed but little to Miss Beale, in whose own youth play was marked by its absence only. Many urged the necessity for founding in every town public schools similar to boys’ grammar schools, where girls could obtain a sound education, without accomplishments, at a low cost. These reports embody a number of facts concerning a state of things now happily passed away. Hundreds of small private schools might have read their doom in them, for the establishment of many public schools, endowed and otherwise, soon followed the inquiry. We see the poor sham education, with its wrong notions of the beautiful and the best, vanish without a regret. Yet, since all human effort has its worth and place, is it possible and fair to say one word above its grave? Was there no genuine wish to give pleasure pleading in the miserable pieces of the boarding-school young lady, and even in the painful drawings which the master’s touch failed to make tolerable? They testify at least to something out of the work-a-day sphere, to the desire for the ‘something afar,’ often the first step to a truer vision. Precious years of girlhood spent on the vain effort to attain accomplishments speak of some dim perception of the refinement and uplifting which men look for in women. Ill-devised, badly attempted, poorly carried out, the thought of giving delight was not only mercenary in aim; behind it was some consciousness of a real human need. The educators of women to-day should know better than to despise its pleading, however imperfectly expressed. ‘May I not have _one_ ornamental one?’ said a brother when a third sister was about to devote herself to obtaining certificates for mathematics. Nine ladies, including Miss Emily Davies, Miss Buss, and Miss Beale, were asked to give evidence before the Commission. Miss Beale’s, which was taken in 1865, is of double interest, at once touching the state of girls’ education in general, and the advance being made in the Ladies’ College, Cheltenham. She took with her a hundred entrance examination papers arranged in order for inspection. Actuated perhaps by the marvellous carefulness which lost nothing, and seeing a use even in what would often be considered waste papers, as well as by the definite aim of preserving a record of progress, she had kept all the answers written by her pupils to entrance examination questions. With the College papers, she showed also some written by children in one of the national schools at Cheltenham, in order that the Commissioners might make a comparison for themselves.