Page:Thirty years' progress in female education.djvu/21

17 to us at eight years of age, or even earlier, into a school which our Cambridge Examiner of last year pronounced to be doing as well as a school could do. At fourteen the girl, well-grounded and disciplined, will go up into the College, probably with a scholarship, for the Four Years' course. At the end of that course she will pass the Matriculation Examination, I hope in honours. She will then be eighteen, and, with or without the help of another Scholarship, she will go on, with many companions and friends, to the more advanced studies of our Higher Course. Before she is twenty-one, or soon after, she wins the stamp of a University degree, and there can be no doubt of her having had good and wide instruction, and having profited by it. Even then, perhaps, she does not altogether leave the College, but is glad to come back to it, as her old intellectual home, for occasional study under less pressure of system, and with more choice and ease. Is there anything in an education like this that need make her a worse daughter, or spoil her for a wife? I trust that, before another generation has gone by, the friends of Queen's College may be able to point to many happy examples of such a career, dispelling all vain fears, and justifying our most hopeful anticipations.