When at last the war was over and she returned to England, the Government voted to give her a large sum of money for what she had done. She, however, refused the money for herself but took it to found a home for training nurses. Nowadays trained nurses are thought almost as necessary as doctors, and any one who is sick can call in a trained nurse to take care of him, but at that time there were no trained nurses and no one had ever heard of such a thing. Florence Nightingale was the first to start trained nursing, and so she is looked upon almost as a saint by trained nurses. In one battle in the Crimea a company of soldiers mounted on horseback were given by mistake an order to attack the enemy. Though they knew it meant certain death, they never hesitated but charged, and two-thirds of them were killed or wounded in less than half an hour. Lord Tennyson, the English poet, has told this story in verse which you may know. It is called “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” JAPANESE NEWS. Japan is a group of islands near China. Although I have not told you about it before, it was an old country, settled in its ways even before Rome was founded. In Europe there have been constant changes of kings and rulers and people and countries. But in Japan they have had the same line of kings since before Christ. Japan wanted no white people in her country, and, with a very few exceptions, she had always kept them out. But in 1854, the same year that England began the Crimean War, an American naval officer named Commodore Perry went to Japan and made an agreement, or treaty, as it is called, by which Japan allowed white people to come in and do business with her people. The Japanese seemed hungry for knowledge, to learn how to do things in the white man’s way. When Perry first went to Japan the Japanese lived the same way they had a thousand years before. They knew nothing of the white man’s inventions or ways of living. But in fifty years’ time they have jumped a thousand years in civilization! These are some of the things you might read about in those old newspapers. Such news would probably have taken up little space; perhaps they would have been found down at the bottom of a column if the newspaper were American. But if the paper was printed between 1861 and 1864, the greater part of it would be about a war that was going on in our own country at that time. This was a war between our own people, a family quarrel, which we call the Civil War. Two parts of our country, the North and the South, did not agree on several matters, chief of which was the question whether the South could own slaves. So they went to war with each other. Each side fought for what it believed was right, and thousands upon thousands gave their lives for what they believed. The war lasted for four years, from 1861 to 1865, before it was decided that no one could ever again own slaves in the United States.