“I am very sorry to say that I do not feel any more industrious, though doubtless I shall have to recover from that complaint in London. Also I regret to say that I have to-day incurred the severe displeasure of our wee blue-eyed laddie!”
CHAPTER III.
INFLUENCE.
“You were the sower of a deathless seed,
The reaper of a glorious harvest, too;
But man is greater than his greatest deed,
And nobler than your noblest work were you!”
Emily Hickey.
“I am always thinking of the first time I ever saw her—in the old house in Camden Street, when I was seven years old, a timid child, sent upstairs with a message, which I stood and mumbled at the door. I remember her now—an elegant dark young lady, she seemed to me—with curls and a low-necked dress, as we all had then. She told me to come forward and deliver my message as if I wasn’t frightened; and I remember now how her vigorous intensity seemed to sweep me up like a strong wind. And that is forty-four years ago!”
This graphic sketch, from the pen of Mrs. Alfred Marks, gives us the young head of the new school as she must have looked in 1850, when the first venture in Clarence Road became the North London Collegiate School for Ladies, reconstructed after the lines of Queen’s College, founded two years before.