others say she made it. Philosophy will hereafter reconcile the two in her case and many others. As a matter of fact, while other young ladies were busy, and perhaps better employed than usual, in enjoying the great exhibition, she was in the Kaiserwerth Institution, on the Rhine, going through the training for nursing, and investigating the methods of organization there and elsewhere.
The strongest sensation she perhaps ever excited among her personal acquaintance was when she undertook to set up the Sanitarium in Harley Street, and left home to superintend the establishment. Her first work there was chiefly financial; and the powers of administration she manifested were a complete justification of what she had done in leaving her father's house to become what people called the matron of a charity. At first common-minded people held up hands and eyes as if she had done something almost scandalous. Between that day and this they must have discovered that she could exalt any function, and that no function could lower her. She rectified the accounts, paid the debts, and brought all round; and she always had leisure to help and comfort the sick ladies in the house. At one time, I remember, there was not a case in the house which was not hopeless; but there was no sign of dismay in Florence Nightingale. She completed her task, showing unconsciously by it how a woman as well as a man may be born to administration and command.
By a sort of treachery only too common in the visitors of celebrated people, we have all seen the letter of Mr. Sidney Herbert, in 1854, entreating Miss Nightingale to go — accompanied by her friends the Bracebridges, who are familiar with life in the East — to Turkey, to minister among the sick and wounded of our army. How soon she was ready, and how she and her band of nurses went, and were just in time to receive the wounded from Inkermann, no Englishman forgets. No man of any nation concerned will ever forget her subsequent services. She had against her not only a chaos of disorder in which to move, and a hell of misery around her to relieve, but special difficulties in the jealousy of the medical officers, the rawness of the nurses so hastily collected, and the incompatibilities of the volunteer ladies who started on the enterprise with her or after her. On the state of the hospitals it can, I hope, never be necessary to enlarge again. We all know how, under her superintendence, places became clean and airy, and persons cleanly, clothed, fed, and afforded some chance of recovery from maladies or wounds. While history abides, the image of Florence Nightingale, lamp in hand, going through miles of beds, night by night, noting every patient as she went, and ministering wherever most wanted, will always glow in men's hearts; and the sayings of the men about her will be traditions for future generations to enjoy.
She was prostrated by the Crimean fever at Balaklava, and carried up to the hospital on the cliffs till she began to mend, when she was taken to sea. She would not come home, because her work at Scutari was not finished. She remained there till the end of the war; by which time she and her military and medical coadjutors had shown what hospitals may be, and how low the rate of mortality of an army may be reduced, even in time of war.
She has never recovered from that fever; and for some years she has been confined by severe and increasing illness. Not the less has she worked, steadily and most efficiently. She cannot fulfil her aim — of training nurses in an institution of her own, and thus raising up a body of successors. The grateful people of England supplied the
