Cheltenham College is thus enabled from its own resources to take a child straight from the nursery, and after many years send her forth as a full-fledged graduate of London University. It is neither to be expected nor desired that many girls should thus receive the whole of their education under one roof, but while some attend one department and some another, the College does in itself comprise the three stages of education: primary, secondary, higher. It has gone even further, for it takes an important part in the work of training teachers, which has been so largely developed of late years. The training department has three distinct divisions, in which teachers are prepared for Kindergarten, Secondary, and Public Elementary Schools. The ‘Hall of Residence,’ which is growing so much in favour now, is also represented at Cheltenham by St. Hilda’s, a residential college for students over eighteen, and in particular the twenty foundationers who are intending teachers and are received at reduced fees. Finally, the Old Girls’ Guild with its eleven hundred members all over the world, its College Settlement in the East End of London, and its biennial meetings at Cheltenham, keeps the College in constant touch with the work, social, philanthropic, and professional, that is being done by women at the present day. The Cheltenham College has become a little world of itself. It presents in miniature each of the developments in women’s education which has taken place in the last fifty years. The dignity of its beautiful buildings, the ideals which take visible form in the statues of representative women, and the stained-glass presentations of Scripture characters and female virtues, seem to link it to the past; the energy and enthusiasm of its Principal, and the full tide of life that pulses through the whole, assure its place in the future of girls’ education. CHAPTER III LIGHT IN DARK PLACES The fifties had witnessed the rise of these earliest colleges, and given hope to a little band of reformers whose efforts on behalf of light and progress were the chief feature of the sixties. Never was a reform happier in its advocates. Frances Buss, dreaming, while yet in her teens, of giving to future generations of girls that public school life which had been denied to her; Anne Clough, recording in her early diary the longing to do her country some great service; Emily Davies, devoting all her thought and energy to making that dream of a women’s college a reality; Dorothea Beale, struggling against opposition and prejudice to build up the wonderful organisation at Cheltenham—these were some of the pioneers whose names have become as household words, whose portraits hang in many a home even beyond the seas, the patron saints of our girl students.