So little did any one dream that Miss Nightingale’s health had been permanently shattered that when the Indian Mutiny broke out in 1857, she offered to go out to her friend Lady Canning, and organize a nursing staff for the troops. And while, with her customary business-like clearness, she proceeded to draw up a detailed account of all the private gifts entrusted to her for the Crimea, and took the opportunity of putting on record her tribute to Lord Raglan, the final arrangements with regard to the Nightingale Fund were still for a time held in suspense, in the hope that she would so far recover strength as to be able to take into her own hands the government of that institution for the training of hospital nurses, to which it was to be devoted. When her friend Mr. Herbert talked gaily in public of chaining her to the oar for the rest of her life, that she might “raise the system of nursing to a pitch of efficiency never before known,” he did not foresee that the invisible chain, which was to bruise her eager spirit, was to be of a kind so much harder to bear. But when, in 1860, her health showed no signs of recovery, she definitely handed over to others the management of the fund, only reserving to herself the right to advise. Her friend Mr. Herbert was, up to the time of his death, the guiding spirit of the council, and it gave Miss Nightingale pleasure that St. Thomas’s Hospital should from the outset be associated with the scheme, because that hospital had originated in one of the oldest foundations in the country for the relief of the sick poor, and in choosing it for the training of lay sisters as nurses, its earliest tradition was being continued. The work of the fund began at St. Thomas’s in 1860, in the old building near London Bridge, before it moved into its present palace at Westminster, of which the Nightingale Training Home is a part. In those first early days an upper floor was arranged for the nurses in a new part of the old hospital, with a bedroom for each probationer, two rooms for the Sister-in-charge, and a sitting-room in which all shared. As the result of the advertisement for candidates in 1860, fifteen probationers were admitted in June, the first superintendent being Mrs. Wardroper. The probationers were, of course, under the authority of the matron, and subject to the rules of the hospital. They were to give help in the wards and receive teaching from the Sisters and medical staff, and if at the end of the year they passed their examination, they were to be registered as certified nurses. [Illustration: Miss Nightingale visiting the Herbert Hospital, Woolwich. (_Bas-relief on the pedestal—Herbert Memorial._)]