“I was twice in training there myself. Of course, since then hospital and district nursing have made great strides. Indeed, district nursing has been invented. “But never have I met with a higher love, a purer devotion than there. There was no neglect. “It was the more remarkable because many of the deaconesses had been only peasants (none were gentlewomen when I was there). “The food was poor—no coffee but bean coffee—no luxury but cleanliness. “FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.” CHAPTER VII. _Years of preparation._ Florence Nightingale, like Felicia Skene, had that saving gift of humour which at times may make bearable an otherwise unbearable keenness of vision. Here, for instance, is her account of the customary dusting of a room in those days (is it always nowadays so entirely different as might be wished?):— “Having witnessed the morning process called ‘tidying the room’ for many years, and with ever-increasing astonishment, I can describe what it is. From the chairs, tables, or sofa, upon which ‘things’ have lain during the night, and which are therefore comparatively clean from dust or blacks, the poor ‘things’ having ‘caught it,’ they are removed to other chairs, tables, sofas, upon which you could write your name with your finger in the dust or blacks. The other side of the things is therefore now evenly dirtied or dusted. The housemaid then flaps everything or some things not out of her reach with a thing called a duster—the dust flies up, then resettles more equally than it lay before the operation. The room has now been ‘put to rights.’” You see the shrewd humour of that observation touches the smallest detail. Miss Nightingale never wasted time in unpractical theorizing. In discussing the far-off attainment of ideal nursing she says:— “Will the top of Mont Blanc ever be made habitable? Our answer would be, it will be many thousands of years before we have reached the bottom of Mont Blanc in making the earth healthy. Wait till we have reached the bottom before we discuss the top.” Did she with her large outlook and big heart see our absurdity as well as our shame when, pointing a finger of scorn at what we named the superstition of other countries, we were yet content to see Spain and France and Italy sending out daily, in religious service to the poor, whole regiments of gentle and refined women trained in the arts of healing and the methods of discipline, while even in our public institutions—our hospitals and workhouses and prisons—it would hardly have been an exaggeration to say that most of the so-called “nurses” of those days were but drunken sluts? She herself has said:— “Shall the Roman Catholic Church do all the work? Has not the Protestant the same Lord, who accepted the services not only of men, but also of women?”