Whatever could aid womanly service—as a voice in choosing our great domestic executive nowadays undoubtedly can—had her sympathy and interest; but what she emphasized most, I take it, at all times, was that when any door opened for service, woman should be not only willing, but also nobly _efficient_. She herself opened many such doors, and her lamp was always trimmed and filled and ready to give light and comfort in the darkest room. It has been well said that in describing a friend in the following words, she unconsciously drew a picture of herself:— “She had the gracefulness, the wit, the unfailing cheerfulness—qualities so remarkable, but so much overlooked, in our Saviour’s life. She had the absence of all ‘mortification’ for mortification’s sake, which characterized His work, and any real work in the present day as in His day. And how did she do all this?... She was always filled with the thought that she must be about her Father’s business.” CHAPTER XXII. _India—Correspondence with Sir Bartle Frere—Interest in village girls—The Lamp._ We come now to Miss Nightingale’s most monumental achievement of all, the reform of sanitary conditions in India—a reform ever widening and developing, branching forth and striking its roots deeper. Her interest in that vast population, that world-old treasury of subtle religious thought and ever-present mystical faith, may perhaps have been in part an inheritance from the Anglo-Indian Governor who was counted in her near ancestry. But there can be little doubt that her ardent and practical desire to improve the conditions of camp life in India began in her intimate care for the soldiers, and her close knowledge of many things unknown to the ordinary English subject. The world-wide freemasonry of the rank and file in our army enabled her to hear while at Scutari much of the life of the army in the vast and distant dominions of Burma and Bengal, and she had that gift for seeing through things to their farthest roots which enabled her to perceive clearly that no mere mending of camp conditions could stay the continual ravages of disease among our men. The evil was deeper and wider, and only as conditions were improved in sanitary matters could the mortality of the army be lessened. She saw, and saw clearly, that the reason children died like flies in India, so that those who loved them best chose the agony of years of parting rather than take the risks, lay not so much in the climate as in the human poisons and putrefactions so carelessly treated and so quickly raised to murder-power by the extreme heat. Much of this comes out clearly in her letter to Sir Bartle Frere, with whom her first ground of friendship had arisen out of their common interest in sanitary matters. What manner of man Sir Bartle was may be divined from a letter to him written by Colonel W. F. Marriott, one of the secretaries of the Bombay Government, at the time of his leaving Bombay:—