“The first place among these may be given to the education of women in all its phases. But concern for the cultivation and spread of educational principles and the professional training of the teacher lay scarcely less near her heart. During the later years, this occupied even more of her attention, and she never had ‘women only’ in her mind. Then it was in the very nature of her that she should be greatly exercised by the politico-educational problems before they rose at all above the horizon of the regular scholastic mind. I wonder how many schoolmasters in England came to look into the question of Welsh Intermediate Education, its creation and organization, when the earliest Welsh Education Bills came before the House of Commons. But we used to discuss these things in those days over our midday meal, and debate on the analogy, or want of analogy, with the English problem. The last piece of public work she did was to answer the queries sent to educationalists by the Royal Commission on Secondary Education. She was too ill then to give evidence before the Commission, too ill to have answered these queries if the ideas of them had been new to her, but she had known her mind about them clearly in the days of her strength, and it was easy to go over familiar ground once more. It was so familiar to her that it was familiar ground to me too; I knew her opinions as well as I knew my own (or better, in so far as they were more determinate).” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER VII. LIFE AT MYRA LODGE. “To know her is a liberal education.” “I have no liking for large boarding-schools. My ideal of education is large, well-conducted day schools, with all the life and discipline that numbers alone can give; not to speak of the greater cheapness and efficiency of the teaching. Our young women are narrowed sadly by the want of sympathy, large experience, and right self-estimation which only mixing with numbers gives. But no large dormitories nor dining-rooms. Let the education be as broad and vivacious as may be, and to a certain extent, public; at all events, public-spirited. But, if boarders must attend, let them live in families, under proper regulations, of course, and attend as day scholars. Large boarding-schools give a sort of hardness, which I, for one, greatly dislike. They destroy the home-feelings, but I need not dwell on these points; my feelings are most in favour of day schools and good homes. “We have two boarding-houses. One, my own, is of very recent establishment—the girls go to and from school with me or an assistant-governess. Their education is just the same as that of all the day pupils.