The first stone of St. Hilda’s College was quietly laid by Canon Medd (one of the trustees and a member of the Ladies’ College Council) in 1884. The opening, which took place on November 27, 1885, was far more dignified than that its illustrious parent had known in 1856. ‘The ceremony of opening the institution,’ so ran the account in the Cheltenham _Examiner_, ‘which was performed by the Bishop of the diocese, took place at three o’clock, and was attended by a large and influential company, who assembled in the study, a spacious—but on this occasion none too spacious—apartment on the ground floor.’ Among those present were the Dean of Winchester,[63] then Chairman of the College Council, who conducted the short service, the late Bishop of Ely, and many of the clergy of the town, besides the friends and benefactors of St. Hilda’s. On entering the study the eye was caught at once by the words which Miss Beale quoted so often that they seemed like the motto of her work: ‘Knowledge puffeth up, but charity buildeth up.’ Here, in this ‘Godly Place,’ as he called the house, the Bishop of Gloucester, who since 1875 had been both nominally and actually Visitor of the Ladies’ College, gave an address full of sympathy for the ideals of the founder. Thus the first resident Training College for teachers, other than elementary, was planned, and built, and opened. In order to make its position more permanent it was constituted into a separate College with a Council of its own. In 1886 a statue of St. Hilda was presented and placed in the hall. On unveiling it, Miss Beale spoke of the Saint’s life, and especially of her work as a teacher. She concluded with a thought, the deeper for the personal touch in it, of memory of what she had had to bear in the past, and indeed in later years also, of misconception and misrepresentation. ‘Shall I touch in conclusion upon the mythical elements in St. Hilda’s story? Myths are truths expressed in poetry. You see the ammonite at her feet, one of the serpents that she, like St. Patrick, is fabled to have turned into stone. There may have been, once, at Whitby, serpents who, with the poisoned tooth of calumny and evil-speaking, wounded and slew. I think she turned them into stone with her look of sorrow. We have not represented the wild geese, whom she is said to have destroyed because they wasted her lands. I half believe that story too; I feel sure that all these disappeared from her abbey lands, but perhaps they were turned into swans.’ St. Hilda’s College was scarcely built and opened before it was necessary to enlarge it by adding a new wing. It was not until this had been done that Miss Beale felt free to devote herself to another foundation, which also was to bear the name of the sainted Abbess.