Page:Millicent Fawcett - Some Eminent Women.djvu/23

 good stead in reclaiming the little waifs and strays to whom she afterwards devoted herself. Her motherliness comes out in a hundred ways in the story of her life. Her endless patience with the truant and naughty children was such as many a real mother might envy. She was especially proud of the title of "the old mother" which the Indian women, whom she visited towards the close of her life, gave her. In writing to a friend, she once said: "There is a verse in the prophecies, 'I have given thee children whom thou hast not borne,' and the motherly love of my heart has been given to many who have never known before a mother's love." She adopted a child in 1858 to be a daughter to her, and writes gleefully: "Just think of me with a little girl of my own! about five years old, ready-made to my hand, without the trouble of marrying—a darling little thing, an orphan," etc. etc. Her friends spoke of her eager delight in buying the baby's outfit.

It was her motherliness that made her so successful with the children in the reformatories and industrial schools; moreover, the children believed in her love for them. One little ragged urchin told a clergyman that Miss Carpenter was a lady who gave away all her money for naughty boys, and only kept enough to make herself clean and decent. On one occasion she heard that two of her ex-pupils had "got into trouble," and were in prison at Winchester. She quickly found an opportunity of visiting them, and one of them exclaimed, directly he saw her, "Oh! Miss Carpenter, I knew you would not desert us!"

Another secret of her power, and also of her elasticity of spirit, was her sense of humour. It was like a silver thread running through her laborious life, saving her from dulness and despondency. In one of her reports, which has to record the return of a runaway, she said: "He came back resembling the prodigal in everything except his repentance!"

The motto which she especially made her own was Dum doceo disco—While I teach, I learn. Her father had a