CHAPTER I. CHILDHOOD. “The very pulse of the machine • • • • • • The reason firm, the temperate will, Endurance, foresight, strength and skill; A perfect woman, nobly plann’d To warn, to comfort, and command.” The record of the life of Frances Mary Buss includes within it, in brief, the story of the modern educational movement, in which she took so leading a part. It is not the less a story of perfect womanliness, in a career that is one of natural and steady growth, from seed to full fruitage. The woman simply fulfils the promise of the child. It is a life most remarkable in this completeness. To very few of the greatest even is it given to see their life-work crowned with complete success. Frances Mary Buss was one of the few who begin life with a fixed aim, and who live to see self-devotion end in triumph. And the end left her, as the beginning had found her, as humble as she was loving. In an age of incessant movement it is very restful to find a life of constant action which is yet so quiet and orderly, with continuity of place as marked as its continuity of purpose. All her work, widely as its influence extended beyond these limits, was carried on within the parish of St. Pancras—fifty years of ceaseless energy, from eighteen years of age to sixty-eight. In holiday-time she used her freedom for as much change as could be compressed within holiday limits, thus seeing much of Europe as well as of her native land. But, excepting for one term of absence from illness, she might always, in working time, have been found at her post. “Not for her name only, but because of her love and good works do I love to connect her with St. Francis!” writes an old pupil;[3] and though at the first shock there may seem a touch of incongruity in thus linking the great ascetic saint of the past and this essentially modern worker, there is, nevertheless, much suggestiveness in the association. Footnote 3: In a bright little sketch in the _Woman’s Penny Paper_, of June 8, 1889.