How thoroughly she succeeded in this aim may be gathered from the letter of one of her pupils written a few months later,—
“We now have an English mistress. Miss Blake, and she gives us so many things to do that I am already too fatigued to entertain me any longer with you: she is an inhabitant of your land, and, if all people are so diligent there, it is a wonder that you are not all philosophers.”
Her diary abounds with shrewd and genial criticisms of her fellow-teachers. Of one whom she rather disliked, she says:
“Miss D. has greatly laughed herself into my good books,—such a cheery simple merry laugh. I don’t think anything very bad could hide under such a laugh at her age.”
And again,—
“That good Frl. von Palaus! Well might I today liken her to a sunbeam! How she lights up the very house,—how bright burns her lamp,—yet how simply!”
No wonder her letters were a joy to the Mother watching at home.
“Your letter has cheered me and done me good,” she writes on Christmas day, “taking away the clouds in a great measure, that would hang over a day that owed so much of its brightness to your dear presence; but truly, as you say, we have a far truer unity and a sympathy which I fear might never have come but through trial and separation.”
Life was not all spent on the mountain heights, of course. Even at this time she had her ups and downs like other people. Here is one of the “downs”:
“Who is sufficient for these things? seems my whole cry today. I don’t know why especially, but I seem so oppressed with a sense of the greatness, the weight of my work,—and of my own miserable insufficiency for it. Oh, so weak and stupid and unfit! And it isn’t humility,—it’s just truth.