‘I well remember Miss Beale’s first appearance at College, and how I and three or four special friends, who were already there ... felt fiercely loyal to the former rule, and told each other we knew exactly what the new Principal would be like, “thin, tall, spectacled, and old-maidy.” I can see her now as she appeared in reality,—the slight, young figure, the very gentle, gliding movements, the quiet face with its look of intense thoughtfulness and utter absence of all poor and common stress and turmoil, the intellectual brow, the wonderful eyes with their calm outlook and their expression of inner vision. You may be sure it was not long before the captious thirteen-year-olds were changed into warm admirers. ‘I do not think her quiet dignity, her strength and personality, her power of influence, could at any time of her strenuous and successful life have been greater or more impressive. We were few in number then, and, of course, saw more of her than was possible for later pupils. ‘I never remember her raising her voice, scolding us, being satirical or impatient with dulness or inattention. She was not satirical even when a small girl, on being asked what criticism might be passed on Milton’s treatment of _Paradise Lost_, ventured the audacious suggestion that the poet was “verbose.”’ Small instances of the new Principal’s own powers of observation and use of outside facts stand out through the mists of time; for instance, ‘an afternoon when she visited the needlework room and found me being most justly blamed for inefficiency. In kindly tones she said to the shy and clumsy culprit, “You ought to sew well, for your mother has such beautiful long fingers,” and somehow I felt comforted and encouraged. Then there was a day when I summoned up courage to go and tell her that I had been guilty of some small disobedience, as well as others who had been detected and punished. She seized the opportunity of impressing upon me that as I was (though only fourteen) a teacher in my father’s Sunday-school,—a fact of which I did not know she was aware,—I must surely see that obedience to rule was necessary. I can still hear the low, earnest tones in which she made her appeal to my sense of justice and right.’ The incident suggests a laxer state of discipline than was ever known after. Assuredly on this point Miss Beale found a good deal to do. Some of the ‘young ladies’ treated the good-natured French master as their brothers at Cheltenham College might have done. There is a story, too, of a convenient cupboard at the end of the schoolroom, large enough for a quiet game or gossip, and of the consternation produced on a little knot of girls who thought they had assembled unobserved, when the door was quietly opened upon them by the Lady Principal herself.