“The education of women was probably at its lowest ebb about half a century ago. It was at that period more pretentious than it had ever been before, and infinitely more costly; and it was likewise more shallow and senseless than can easily be believed. To inspire young women with due gratitude for their present privileges, won for them by my contemporaries, I can think of nothing better than to acquaint them with some of the features of school-life in England in the days of their mothers. I say advisedly in those of their mothers, for in those of their grandmothers things were by no means equally bad. There was much less pretence, and more genuine instruction, so far as it extended.” We are justified in the conclusion that Mrs. Wyand’s school, in which Frances Mary Buss received her training, as pupil and then as assistant, was one of the survivals from this olden time. From one of the pupils, who was there as a child while Miss Buss was assistant-mistress, we have a sketch of Mrs. Wyand as a slight, erect little lady, with very dark eyes, and with black hair, in the ringlets of that era, confined on each side by tortoiseshell side-combs. She always wore long rustling silk gowns, and altogether was an impressive personage, before whom the most volatile schoolgirl at once grew staid and sober. Mention of Miss Buss herself seems limited to a certain satisfaction in having carried provocation to so great an extent as to make the young teacher cry. But we may easily imagine that before the end of that encounter the tables were turned, and that then may have begun the treatment of “naughty girls” so successful in later life. Thanks to the good training received under Mrs. Wyand, Miss Buss was able, at the age of eighteen, to take an active part in the school opened by Mrs. Buss in Clarence Road. Before she was twenty-three she had gained the Queen’s College Diploma, and she then became the head of the new school in Camden Street, which was the outcome of this first venture. The course of instruction included most of the subjects now taught, and Miss Eleanor Begbie—who claims to have been the first pupil in Camden Street, and who has been superintendent of the Sandall Road School, familiar, therefore, with all new methods—affirms confidently that the Science and Art classes taken by Mr. Buss were “as good, and quite as interesting, as anything given now.” This is confirmed by Mrs. Pierson, who says of these very happy school-days— “Her dear father greatly added to the enjoyment of school life by giving us courses of lectures illustrated by diagrams on geology, astronomy, botany, zoology, and chemistry, quite equal to those given by highly paid professors of the present day, and he gave them for love, and nothing extra was put down in the bills, although each course was an education by itself, given in his lucid and most interesting way.”