Agnew, Eliza

The study of geography, as far as the book was concerned, was finished long before Eliza was old enough to carry out her purpose, but she never forgot it or gave it up. By and by the way opened, and Miss Agnew sailed away to the Island of Ceylon where as you know, there are pearl fisheries . . . But this missionary was a seeker after pearls of a different sort, and she found them, too. The pearls were the souls of girls in that tropical island, who were led to Jesus Christ by this missionary.
For all of forty-one years Miss Agnew was the principal of a girls’ boarding-school in Oodooville, on the island, and, altogether, she taught a thousand girls. In some cases she had the children, and in others the grandchildren, of her first pupils. She was so gentle, and loving, and good, that they all called her “Mother.” This meant that they felt themselves to be her daughters, and this is the reason that the good missionary was called at last “The Mother of a Thousand Daughters.”
She was very, very happy in her work of “finding pearls,” and it was said that no girl who took the full course in the school went out without becoming a Christian. During the forty-one years, six hundred girls came out on the Lord’s side, and were received into the church as members. Many of these girls became teachers in village schools, and in other places. Many became the wives of native teachers, preachers, catechists, doctors, lawyers, merchants and farmers, who brought up their children “in the fear of the Lord, faithfully.” Some were even taken as wives by the chief men of the district, and had great opportunities to do good. In northern Ceylon forty Bible readers gave their time to this work. In forty-three years Miss Agnew never went home at all. She died in 1883, aged seventy-six. Her watchword was: “I’ll tell the Master.”
—Julia Johnston, in Fifty Missionary Heroes.