never endeavoured to make a single convert.” The military men were not less enthusiastic. When Colonel Connolly, brother-in-law to Mr. Bruin, of Carlow, was travelling, after his return from the war, near the Bruin estate, a fellow-traveller spoke disrespectfully of nuns. The colonel, a Protestant, not only made a warm defence of the ladies who had nursed him in Russia and Ottoman regions, and for their sakes of all other nuns, but handed the assailant his card, saying: “If you say another word against these saintly gentlewomen I shall call you out.” The slanderer subsided very quickly. Sister Aloysius, one of those very Sisters who were with Miss Nightingale in the huts, has written in her “Memories of the Crimea”:— “It was said at one time that the War Office was on the point of issuing a mandate forbidding us to speak even to the Catholic soldiers on religion, or to say a prayer for them. However, that mandate never came; we often thought the guardian angels of the soldiers prevented it.” It made no difference to the loyalty of their work together that Miss Nightingale was not a Roman Catholic; they all obeyed the Master who has taught that it is not the way in which He is addressed that matters, but whether we help those whom He gave His life to help, and in loving and serving whom, we love and serve Him. So in London and in Balaclava the good of her influence was felt. In London the funds mounted, and at Balaclava the excellent work among the soldiers still went on. Her very presence among the men helped to keep them sober and diligent, and in every way at their best, in those first months of victory when heads are only too easily turned. And she had the reward she most desired, for she was able to speak of these brave fellows—the nameless heroes of the long campaign—as having been “uniformly quiet and well-bred.” Those words, it is true, were spoken of the men attending the reading-huts; but they are quite in line with her more general verdict with regard to Tommy; though, alas, we cannot stretch them to cover his behaviour at the canteens, where we are told that much drunkenness prevailed. She had advanced money for the building of a coffee-house at Inkermann, and had helped the chaplain to get maps and slates for his school work, and the bundles of magazines and illustrated papers, sent out from England in answer to her appeal, as well as books sent out by the Duchess of Kent, cheered and brightened many a long hour for the men. She was always on the alert to help them about sending home their pay, and quick to care for the interests of their wives and children.