CHAPTER II.
GIRLHOOD.
“O’er wayward childhood would’st thou hold firm rule
And sun thee in the light of happy faces,
Love, hope, and patience, these must be thy graces,
And in thine own heart let them first keep school.”
Coleridge.
Of Miss Buss as a girl we have a very telling little sketch in her own words, showing how this happy childhood merged only too quickly into a girlhood early fitting her for the strenuous life-work towards which she was moving on through long silent years of training.
“I may as well take this opportunity of saying that within a month after I had reached my fourteenth birthday I began to teach, and that never since, with the exception of holidays and two occasions of serious illness, have I spent my days out of a schoolroom. I was in sole charge of a large school for a week at a time when I was sixteen. When I was twenty-three I was mistress of a large private school, containing nearly a hundred pupils; that hundred was turned into two hundred by the time I was twenty-five.
“I mention these facts just to show you how intensely active my life has been, for it is always to be borne in mind that in addition to spending my days in the schoolroom, I had to gain the whole of my education, such as it is, in the evening or in the holidays, and that for some years in my early life there was a great burden of money anxieties.