She helped in the training of young voices in the village, and was among the entertainers when the carol-singers enjoyed their mince-pies and annual coins in the hall. The workhouse knew her well, and any wise enterprise in the neighbourhood for help or healing among the poor and the sad was sure of her presence and of all the co-operation in the power of her neighbours, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Herbert, with whom for some years before the Crimea she shared much companionship in such work. This friendship was an important influence in our heroine’s life, for Mr. Herbert was of those who reveal to the dullest a little of the divine beauty and love, and his wife was through all their married life his faithful and devoted friend, so that they made a strong trio of sympathetic workers; for “Liz,” as her husband usually called her in his letters to their common friend Florence Nightingale, seemed to have fully shared his unbounded faith in the noble powers and high aims of the said Florence, whom she too loved and admired. She was a daughter of General Charles Ashe à Court, and she and Sidney Herbert had known one another as children. Indeed, it was in those early days, when she was quite a little child, that Elizabeth, who grew up to be one of the most beautiful women of her day, said of Sidney, then, of course, a mere boy, that that was the boy she was going to marry, and that she would never marry any one else. Many a long year, however, had rolled between before he rode over to Amington from Drayton, where he often met her, though no longer such near neighbours as in the early Wiltshire days, and asked the beautiful Elizabeth to be his wife. The intimacy between the two families had never ceased, and General à Court, himself member for Wilton, had worked hard for Sidney’s first election for the county. We shall hear more of these dear and early friends of Florence Nightingale as her story unfolds, but let us turn now for a moment to herself.