‘Far from dissuading you from sending in your resignation, I think it will be expected. We did not appeal to the Committee that their attention should end in talk, but in giving you support moral and professional. With less than this, it is inconsistent with self-respect, or the duty you owe to the children, to remain.... Now Christmas is approaching, and, as matters remain as they were, certainly not improved,—I would seek at once to be relieved. Do not suppose for a moment I shall consider you are forsaking an appointment to which you have been called, or in which time would afford you redress.... Leave it then, and if nothing more congenial presents itself, we can afford to wait our time, and let us try together if we cannot carry forward, or at least make more widely known, our views of what might be effected if your half of the human family more extensively used that influence of which they are all the dispensers, as men are of their power. This is indeed, as Christ said to the woman of Samaria, “living water,” if derived from Him, satisfying all thirst from its welling up from within; and by its purity testing the value of everything it is brought in contact with. You say you have learned much at Casterton. What matters it if you have to wait for the Harvest that we are sure “we shall reap if we faint not,” and gather “fruit unto life eternal.” It is often in this world, indeed, that “one soweth and another reapeth,” but though delayed the seed is not lost.’ Before Miss Beale could formally send in her threatened resignation to the Committee, she received the following letter from the Chairman:— ‘On your last interview with the Committee you implied an intention of resigning in case certain alterations should not be made by the Committee.... ‘The Committee are of opinion that under the circumstances it would be better that your connection with the school should cease after Christmas next, they paying you a quarter’s salary in advance. It will readily be imagined that this summary step on the part of the Committee caused great distress to one of Miss Beale’s sensitive nature. Nor was it easy for her to see why the difficult part she had taken upon herself for the good of the school should be misunderstood. At that moment it must have seemed like a sentence of failure,— ‘For who can so forecast the years, To find in loss a gain to match.’ Among the crowning successes of later life she recognised that the blow had had its place in fashioning her life’s work. Her letter home on the subject is not preserved, but the following is evidently an answer to it:— ‘_December 1857._