“I was motherless when I first knew Miss Buss, and had been utterly spoilt by an over-indulgent father until he married again a lady quite out of sympathy with a girl of fourteen. I should have turned into a veritable fury, and ended in perdition, if I had not come across the spiritual influence of dear Miss Buss. She supplied every want in my soul, and I gladly gave myself to her loving guidance, often falling, but always encouraged, until in after years I was strong enough to be able to part with life’s best treasures one by one, and to say—
“‘It is well with my husband,
It is well with my child.’
“I could fill a volume with all dear Miss Buss has enabled me to be, to do and to suffer, and with what she has been to me through all—and not to me only, for all the girls of my time worshipped her, and she never of her own accord loses touch with an old pupil. But what I have said will doubtless suffice for your purpose.”
A large volume might indeed be filled with “memories”—extending from those early days till a year ago—of the kindness and sympathy ever flowing out from that time to this. It seemed to me very striking when the same post brought two letters—one dating back to 1850, the other only to 1890—and, spite of the forty years between, telling just the same story.
The one shows us the young teacher standing at the parlour door, “with a kiss for each pupil at the end of the day’s work,” with a “grace of manner and gentle voice” deeply impressing the child to whom for forty-four years afterwards she became “ever a most kind and constant friend, ever ready with sympathy.”
Then comes a picture of a wild, daring girl, dashing to the end of the long garden and back in the rain, on her return to be called into the parlour to account for herself. Of the reproof she adds—
“I remember little but its gentleness, and the kind arm round me while it was being given; but, at the end, I was required to promise never to do anything because I was dared to do it. After that Miss Buss led me by a silken thread all through my school-days, though the other teachers often found me headstrong and troublesome.”
There is an account of how Miss Buss ended a standing feud between the girl and “Mademoiselle” by the exaction of a promise from the reluctant pupil that she would set herself to win the French prize. And finally comes the graver side of this happy relation—
“When at the age of thirteen I left school to go abroad, Miss Buss still continued her kindness, writing to me while I was away, and giving me kind welcome on my return. To see her again was always my first thought after the home-greeting.