The picture of Miss Nightingale that dwells in the popular mind no doubt owes its outline to the memories of the men she nursed with such tenderness and skill. And it is a true picture. Like all good workmen, she loved her work, and nursing was her chosen work so long as her strength remained. None can read her writing, and especially her _Nursing Notes_ and her pamphlet on nursing among the sick poor, without feeling how much she cared for every minutest detail, and how sensitively she felt with, and for, her patients. But such a picture, as will have been made clear by this time, shows only one aspect of her life-work. One of her nearest intimates writes to me of her difficulties in reforming military hospitals, and her determination therefore to give herself later in life to the reform of civilian nursing; but in reality she did both, for through the one she indirectly influenced the other, and began what has been widening and unfolding in every direction ever since. Those who knew her best speak almost with awe of her constructive and organizing power. She was indeed a pioneer and a leader, and girt about with the modesty of all true greatness. Like Joan of Arc, she heeded not the outward voices, but, through all faults and sorrows, sought to follow always and only the voice of the Divine One. This gave her life unity and power. And when she passed on into the life beyond, the door opened and closed again very quietly, leaving the whole world the better for her ninety years in our midst. “When I have done with this old suit,” says George Meredith, “so much in need of mending;” but hers, like his, was a very charming suit to the last, and even to the end of her ninety years the colouring was clear and fresh as a girl’s. Like all strong, true, disinterested people, she made enemies—where is there any sanitary reformer who does not?—yet seldom indeed has any one, man or woman, won deeper and more world-wide love. But that was not her aim; her aim was to do the will of her Commander and leave the world better than she found it. Seldom has there been a moment when women have more needed the counsel given in one of the letters here published for the first time, when she begs of a dear friend that her name may be that “of one who obeys authority, however unreasonable, in the name of Him who is above all, and who is Reason itself.” And as we think of the debt the world owes to Florence Nightingale and of all she did for England, for India, and not only for the British Empire, but for the world, we may well pause for a moment on the words that closed our opening chapter, in which she begs her fellow-workers to give up considering their actions in any light of rivalry as between men and women, and ends with an entreaty:—