56 Ellen Key At twenty, she had begun holding "Sunday- school" for the young people on the estate during the summers, which the family still always spent at Sundsholm, and here she taught history, natural science, literature, etc., and loaned out books from the little "Folk- library" she had herself founded by adding some new volumes to her own old books. From girlhood, and long before the movement for the education of the masses had become the fashion, Ellen Key had busied herself in such work, giving of her working time as well as her leisure hoiu*s. Alone, she dwelt with thoughts which, when she later expressed them in print, she was accused of having borrowed from abroad When Ellen was a few years past twenty, she received an offer to begin as a teacher, and later become principal of a Folk-high- school for girls in Skane, in which some of her father's senatorial friends were interested. With this position in view, she spent the sum- mer of 1874 in Denmark, studying the fore- most schools of that kind, principally those of Vallekilde, Testrup, and Askov. When Ellen, in her own profound way, had thoroughly inspected these important institutions, she came to the conclusion that she was too