FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE 377 Nightingale Home. In this home Miss Nightingale takes the deepest interest, constantly having the nurses and sisters to visit her, and learning from them the most minute details of its working. Great is evidently her rejoicing when one of her " Nightingales" proves to be a really fine nurse, such a one, for instance, as Agnes Jones, the reformer of workhouse nursing. This was the high position Florence Nightingale conquered for her fellow- women. Hundreds have occupied, and are still occupying, the ground she won for them. " And I give a quarter of a century's European experience," she goes on, " when J say that the happiest people, the fondest of their occupation, the most thankful for their lives, are, in my opinion, those engaged in sick nursing." Officials in high places, ever since the Crimean war, have sent Miss Night- ingale piles, mountains one might say, of reports and blue books for her ad- vice. She seems to be able to condense any number of them into half a dozen telling sentences ; for instance, the mortality in Indian regiments, during times of peace, became exceedingly alarming. Reports on the subject were poured in upon her. " The men are simply treated like Strasbourg geese," she said in effect. "They eat, sleep, frizzle in the sun, and eat and sleep again. Treat them reasonably, and they will be well." She has written much valuable ad- vice on " How to live and not die in India." Children's hospitals have also engaged much of her attention. You can- not open one of her books at hazard without being struck with some shrewd remark, that tells how far-reaching is her observation ; as in this, on the play- grounds of children's hospitals : " A large garden-ground, laid out in sward and grass hillocks, and such ways as children like (not too pretty, or the chil- dren will be scolded for spoiling it), must be provided." Here, I am sorry to find, my space comes to an end, but not, I hope, before I have been able to sketch in some slight way what great results will assuredly follow, when Faith and Science are united in one person. In the days, which we may hope are now dawning, when these gifts will be united, not in an in- dividual here and there, but in a large portion of our race, there will doubtless be many a devoted woman whose knowledge may equal her practical skill, and her love for God and her fellow-creatures, who will understand, even more thor- oughly than most of us now can (most of us being still so ignorant), how deep a debt of gratitude is due to her who first opened for women so many paths of duty, and raised nursing from a menial employment to the dignity of an " Art of Charity " to England's first great nurse, the wise, beloved, and far-seeing heroine of the Crimean war, the Lady of the Lamp, Florence Nightingale.
