“The scene of your departure stirred me much. That bright evening, the crowd on the pier and shore as the boat put off, the music from the _Octavia_, as the band played ‘Auld Lang Syne’ as we passed, were all typical and impressive by association of ideas. But it was not a shallow sympathy with which I took in all the circumstances. I could divine some of your thoughts. If I felt like Sir Bedivere, left behind ‘among new men, strange faces, other minds,’ you must have felt in some degree like King Arthur in the barge, ‘I have lived my life, and that which I have done may He Himself make pure.’ I do not doubt that you felt that all this ‘mouth honour’ is only worth so far as it is the seal of one’s own approving conscience, and though you could accept it freely as deserved from their lips, yet at that hour you judged your own work hardly. You measured the palpable results with your conceptions and hopes, and were inclined to say, ‘I am no better than my fathers.’ But I, judging now calmly and critically, feel—I may say, see—that though the things that seem to have failed be amongst those for which you have taken most pains, yet they are small things compared with the work which has not failed. You have made an impression of earnest human sympathy with the people of this country, which will deepen and expand, so that it will be felt as a perpetual witness against any narrower and less noble conception of our relation to them, permanently raising the moral standard of highest policy towards them; and your name will become a traditional embodiment of a good governor.”[24] Frere had seen that the filthy condition of many of the roads, after the passing of animals and the failure to cleanse from manure, was of itself a source of poison, though the relation between garbage and disease-bearing flies was then less commonly understood, and he was never tired of urging the making of decent roads; but this, he knew, was only a very small part of the improvements needed. His correspondence with Miss Nightingale began in 1867, and in that and the five following years they exchanged about one hundred letters, chiefly on sanitary questions. It was part of her genius always to see and seize her opportunity, and she rightly thought that, as she says in one of her letters, “We might never have such a favourable conjunction of the larger planets again: “You, who are willing and most able to organize the machinery here; Sir John Lawrence, who is able and willing, provided only he knew what to do; and a Secretary of State who is willing and in earnest. And I believe nothing would bring them to their senses in India more than an annual report of what they have done, with your comments upon it, laid before Parliament.”