Yet from those four walls what electric messages of help and common sense were continuously flashing across the length and breadth of the world! She was regarded as an expert in her own subjects, and long before her Jubilee Fund enabled her to send forth the Queen’s Nurses, she was, as we have already seen, busy writing and working to improve not only nursing in general, but especially the nursing of the sick poor; and unceasingly she still laboured for the army. Repeated mention has been made of General Evatt, to whose memory of Miss Nightingale I am much indebted. General Evatt served in the last Afghan campaign, and what he there experienced determined him to seek an interview, as soon as he returned to England, with her whom he regarded as the great reformer of military hygiene—Florence Nightingale. In this way and on this subject there arose between them a delightful and enduring friendship. Many and many a time in that quiet room in South Street where she lay upon her bed—its dainty coverlet all strewn with the letters and papers that might have befitted the desk or office of a busy statesman, and surrounded by books and by the flowers that she loved so well—he had talked with her for four hours on end, admiring with a sort of wonder her great staying power and her big, untiring brain. He did not, like another acquaintance of mine, say that he came away feeling like a sucked orange, with all hoarded knowledge on matters great and small gently, resistlessly drawn from him by his charming companion; but so voracious was the eager, sympathetic interest of Miss Nightingale in the men and women of that active world whose streets, at the time he learned to know her, she no longer walked, that no conversation on human affairs ever seemed, he said, to tire her. And her mind was ever working towards new measures for the health and uplifting of her fellow-creatures. We have seen how eager she was to use for good every municipal opportunity, but she did not stop at the municipality, for she knew that there are many womanly duties also at the imperial hearth; and without entering on any controversy, it is necessary to state clearly that she very early declared herself in favour of household suffrage for women, and that “the North of England Society for Women’s Suffrage is the proud possessor of her signature to an address to Mr. Disraeli, thanking him for his favourable vote in the House of Commons, and begging him to do his utmost to remove the injustice under which women householders suffered by being deprived of the parliamentary vote.”[23] [Illustration: Florence Nightingale’s London House, 10 South Street, Park Lane (house with balcony), where she died, August 14, 1910.]