“To these lectures Miss Buss sent all the young teachers whom she could induce to go. Very often, I suppose, they resisted the light, as, in the pride of youth and eagerness to be doing, they resist the light of the training college still. In eagerness and self-confidence I was probably equal to most, but I had been theorizing about education on my own account, and was very sensible of the darkness. So when she told me about the College of Preceptors and Mr. Payne, she showed me what I was looking for, and I eagerly accepted the suggestion of attending the lectures. She told me afterwards how much she was pleased with my ready interest. It was indeed at this point that our minds first met. And perhaps this was partly why, when she brought me into the hall to let me out herself, she first held out her hand and then looking at me in the way her girls so well know, she suddenly took me in her arms and kissed me. But chiefly it was an impulse of motherly tenderness that prompted her. I was young and had suffered. “This was in January, before school opened. In February, she sent for me to come twice a week and teach mathematics. The school was in 202, Camden Road, then, and there were 300 girls. Miss Armstead and Miss Lyndon were in the first class I ever taught. They were great friends, but had agreed not to sit together, so that they might escape the temptation of talking. I had never been inside a school before, and had no idea what girls other than I had been were like intellectually. I might well feel modest about the need of training in the _technique_ of managing a class, the one thing in which the College of Preceptors’ lectures did not specially help me. But the girls were very good, and did not ‘try it on,’ with one exception, and she used to be sorry, and apologize of her own accord. I remember being wonderfully impressed by the high tone of feeling that prevailed, the absence of petty jealousies, the trustworthiness of the girls, and the confidence placed in them about marks and conduct. Over all the head-mistress was as a second conscience. Nothing mean, petty, or egotistic could survive contact with the fresh bracing air of her personality. I was very new and very inexperienced in school ways; she had her little anxieties about me, and used to look after my classes a good deal at first. All young teachers know what this feels like, but it was a great help none the less, and we must all win our spurs before we get them. Except those who remained of the original staff, I was the only teacher there who had not been a pupil.