yet honoured it, and the passage of the heroic band through France was one continued triumph. As is usual with our gay neighbours, the Parisians looked as much to the dress of the woman as to her physiognomy; and many an idler on the Boulevarts was astonished that La belle Anglaise should seek so little aid from costume to enhance attractions, whose unpretentiousness he could hardly comprehend. Miss Nightingale, however, did not come to France to court or to be courted, she therefore discarded the vapid compliments of "sentiment" for a rapid assumption of her self-imposed duties, and the 5th of November saw her safely installed in the Barrack Hospital at Scutari.

Her fearful task was soon inaugurated by the arrival of the wounded from the battle of Inkermann. Government arrangements were almost worse than useless, and there is ample proof that, but for the aid of the nurses, brought down by Miss Nightingale, and her own quiet determination, which overawed officials, restored intelligence to the bewildered and incompetent, and taught the most indifferent to feel, the loss after an engagement would have doubled that which occurred in it. While the necessaries sent from England were " rotting under the snow at Balaklava, or hidden in the mud outside the Custom-house at Constantinople, she has been known frequently to stand twenty hours, on the arrival of fresh detachments of sick, apportioning

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quarters, distributing stores, directing the labours of her corps, assisting at the most painful operations, where her presence might soothe or support, and spending hours over men dying of cholera fever. Indeed, the more awful to every sense, any particular case might be, the more certainly might be seen her slight form bending over the patient, administering to his ease by every means in her power, and seldom quitting his side until death released him."

Meanwhile, supplies had been brought so near as, by their non-administration, to mock the craving of the sufferers; but red-tapeism and routine had claimed and exercised arbitrary sway, until Miss Nightingale dethroned them. "The rule of the service could not be transgressed, even to save hundreds of men." Soldiers were exposed to all the inclemency of the weather, shoeless and in rags, while the new apparel was sent off to perish by the damp and the worm, in an opposite direction to the disappointed seekers. But indolence, self-interest, and incapacity, rode riot, like three demons of mischief, under the patronage of Misrule; so that it is even recorded, on one occasion, that Miss Nightingale had a storehouse broken open, and its contents distributed, in violation of a rule of the service," which had ordained that necessaries, even for present use, should only be procured by the compli'cated wheel-within-wheel machinery of an incompetent Board, in collision, not in conjunction, with a mismanaged commissariat !

Through evil and through good report, this good Samaritan held on her way, and her example prevailed to swell the number of the missionaries of mercy.

Five thousand sick lay in the hospitals on the Dardanelles and Bosphorus, three thousand in the barrack hospital alone; a demand so great upon her original little force, as to cause her gladly to hail Miss Stanley's arrival, in January, 1855, with fifty more nurses. As step by step, she advanced, so more determined grew the opposition of official ill-will. True, she was supported by the sympathy of the nation, and this so loudly applauded her efforts as to intimidate her enemies, and force them to relax the silly restrictions obstructing the exercise of common sense and humanity. But disease increased its ravages: the medical staff suffered so severely that only one attendant was well enough to afford scant help to twentyone wards. Yet fever and death produced no fear in the soldier's true benefactress. "6 Wherever," observes Mr. Macdonald, "is the hand of the despoiler distressingly nigh, there is that incomparable woman sure to be seen; her benignant presence is an influence for good comfort, even amid the struggles of expiring nature. When all the medical officers have retired for the night, and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds."

And it was no common scene of hospital experience