ashing red
As flame, or white as snow:
The ships, as David said.
'Winds rush and waters roll:
Their strength, their beauty, brings
Into mine heart the whole
Magnificence of things.'"
LIONEL JOHNSON.

The conclusion is only an opportunity for repeating how much there is
still to be said, and even more to be thought of and to be done, in the
great problem and work of educating girls. Every generation has to face
the same problem, and deals with it in a characteristic way. For us it
presents particular features of interest, of hope and likewise of
anxious concern. The interest of education never flags; year after year
the material is new, the children come up from the nursery to the
school-room, with their life before them, their unbounded possibilities
for good, their confidence and expectant hopefulness as to what the
future will bring them. We have our splendid opportunity and are greatly
responsible for its use. Each precious result of education when the girl
has grown up and leaves our hands is thrown into the furnace to be
tried--fired--like glass or fine porcelain. Those who educate have, at a
given moment, to let go of their control, and however solicitously they
may have foreseen and prepared for it by gradually obliging children to
act without coercion and be responsible for themselves, yet the critical
moment must come at last and "every man's work shall be manifest," "the
fire shall try every man's work, of what sort it is" (1 Cor. III).
Life tries the work of education, "of what sort it is." If it stands the
test it is more beautiful than before, its colours are fixed. If it
breaks, and some will inevitably break in the trial, a Catholic
education has left in the soul a way to recovery. Nothing, with us, is
hopelessly shattered, we always know how to make things right again. But
if we can we must secure the character against breaking, our effort in
education must be to make something that will last, and for this we must
often sacrifice present success in consideration of the future, we must
not want to see results. A small finished building is a more sightly
object than one which is only beginning to rise above its foundations,
yet we should choose that our educational work should be like the second
rather than the first, even though it has reached "the ugly stage,"
though it has its disappointments and troubles before it, with its daily
risks and the uncertainty of ul