[Footnote 1:  Among the Huts, p. 116.]

The policy of employing Egyptians or Syrians as teachers was frequently challenged by people in England, and vigorously defended by Miss Whately.  “The schools are under my personal superintendence,” she wrote in 1885, “receiving not only daily supervision, but examination from me, and I never gave up the teaching of any part of Scripture into other hands, until I had truly converted as well as educated teachers as assistants.” [1]

[Footnote 1:_The Times_, Aug. 15, 1885.]

In 1879 pupils had to be refused for want of room, and from that time till her death the scholars numbered nearly seven hundred.

The period of the Arabi rebellion in 1882 was a severe testing time.  Though deliverance came at the eleventh hour, and Cairo was spared, “the inhabitants,” writes Miss Whately in her report for that year, “lived for months in a sickening anxiety which can hardly be realized by those who only know the general facts from the papers.”  Not only Jews and Christians, but Moslems who remained faithful to the Khedive were threatened with torture and death.  Miss Whately stayed at her post long after nearly all the Europeans had fled, and only left when the English Consul informed her that he would be no longer responsible for her safety.  “The superintendent of the Mission Boys’ School remained in Cairo at great personal risk, to keep things together as much as possible.  The schools were not closed till the bombardment of Alexandria, when the excited mobs in the streets made it unfit for children to be abroad, and it soon afterwards was necessary to take away the board with the notice of the ‘British Schools,’ &c.”  The school buildings were used as a refuge for the homeless and persecuted, both foreigners and Egyptians.  A list of buildings doomed to pillage included the Mission House.  “The second day after the entrance of the victorious army, the superintendent opened the school.  The pupils flocked back by degrees.  At first some of the children of Arabists hung back, but began to follow the rest after a time.”  Miss Whately had the joy of knowing that in the time of extremest danger many young Coptic girls, formerly her pupils, when urged to pretend to turn Moslems to save their lives, had replied, “No! if we die, we die in the faith of the Messiah.” [1]

[Footnote 1:_Report of English Egyptian Mission for_ 1882.]

Yet the same year a night school for youths of the better classes was established.  Several years previously Miss E.J.  Whately had founded in connection with the school a branch for the education of the children of European parents in Cairo.  After the rebellion these were much less numerous, and the branch, henceforth known as the Levantine School, was chiefly attended by Jewesses, Armenians, Syrians, and others of Eastern race, who paid for the education they received.  Among them it did good service.  Subsequently small branch mission schools were established in Gizeh and other places.