How many a girl must have inwardly rebelled against the deadening routine of the old conventional schools, though so few had the strength by which this once “timid child” won her own freedom. Measuring what have been by the force of that first never-forgotten impression of the “vigorous intensity that swept her up like a strong wind,” her words of regret that her school-life had not been spent under that influence come as among the saddest of the laments of that sorrowful day— “Thinking it over after she was gone, a perfect agony of regret came over me that I was not always her pupil. In church, that day, the regret was so pregnant that it almost stupefied me.... When I think that Miss Buss was at our very doors, I can scarcely bear to look back. Think of what I might have been saved—the unutterable loneliness of those five years, the misery, the deliberate fostering, of set purpose, of a morbid self-consciousness and self-distrust. Why, I have never got over it! The deadening effect of those five years clings to me still. I consider that it kept me back fifteen years. Instead of leaving school broken-spirited and irresolute, I should have had the inspiration of knowing that I had been part of the great human movement. As it was, I had to grope my way to modern thought. “I made very few friends at school, and shrunk from all. If I had gone _there_ I should have found a door open into the real life I sought. But, above all, just think of exchanging Miss S—— for Miss Buss!—spontaneity for repression, an honest straightforward ideal of duty, for a system based upon ‘Mason on Self-knowledge’! (That book ought to be burnt by the common hangman.) “Oh, I thought some bitter thoughts as I sat that day among the old pupils, thankful just to have the right to sit there at all!” There seems indeed good cause for regret that a nature so sensitive should not have had full room for unchecked growth in the warm sunny atmosphere of this school, when the young teacher was free to throw herself into the lives of her pupils. Freedom of growth—with all the joy of such freedom—forms the great wonder of those early days. The proof of the true vitality of this growth is in the fact that these early pupils came themselves into possession of that power of impressing others which was so distinctive of their teacher. I was very much struck by this fact when I first heard of Miss Buss from one of these old pupils, Miss L. Agnes Jones, who, though only for a few months under her influence, never lost the impression either of the teaching or of the teacher, so unlike all previous experience. Years afterwards, the time for action found her ready, and she became a potent factor in the first stages of the change that has affected so many lives. All the “memories” from old pupils bear witness to the same thing, put strongly by one who was afterwards a member of her staff:—