“As you will see, our list of subscriptions is very small. The paper is as yet only a _proof_, because we cannot circulate largely any statement, until the lease of the new house is actually signed. “When you return to town, I hope to have the pleasure of seeing you. Agnes has often spoken of you to me, and I am glad to know you are interested in our plans. “If we can get one school for girls well started, the ice will be broken, and many others will be set up in imitation. “If you wish for further information, or for more copies of the proof, I shall be glad to give you either. “Believe me, “Very truly yours, “FRANCES M. BUSS.” Pleased as I was with this first communication from one whom I had already learned to admire, I could have no inkling of all it would mean for me in the future, as the beginning of a friendship which steadily deepened through the four and twenty years that followed; a friendship which can only go on deepening after we cease to count by days or years, since it is of the kind not begun for any ending. As I left her that day the feeling of her life went with me in my impression of the grief it had been to her, just as her pupils began really to profit by her teaching, to be compelled to give so many of them up. Social reasons, family reasons, financial reasons, no reason at all—anything, in those days, was sufficient excuse for ending a girl’s education. But, nevertheless, year by year, these same girls came back, under the pressure of some unforeseen need, or even in the ordinary course of things, as their fathers death broke up the family, to ask their teacher’s advice how they might gain a livelihood, and to rack her tender heart with the hopelessness of their lot. Half-educated, wholly untrained, what could they do? They could do nothing. What she could do for them as individuals was utterly inadequate, though she never failed to do whatever might lie in her power. But each separate case that came before her made her the more resolute to help them, as a whole, by giving them the greatest good of all—_a thorough education_.