She left vivid memories. “No one has ever passed so brilliant an examination,” said Fliedner, “or shown herself so thoroughly mistress of all she had to learn, as the young, wealthy, and graceful Englishwoman.” Agnes Jones, who was trained there before her work in Liverpool left a memorable record of life spent in self-denying service, tells how the workers at Kaiserswerth longed to see Miss Nightingale again, how her womanliness and lovableness were remembered, and how among the sick people were those who even in dying blessed her for having led them to the Redeemer; for throughout her whole life her religion was the very life of her life, as deep as it was quiet, the underlying secret of that compassionate self-detachment and subdued fire, without which her wit and shrewdness would have lost their absolving glow and underlying tenderness. Hers was ever the gentleness of strength, not the easy bending of the weak. She was a pioneer among women, and did much to break down the cruel limitations which, in the name of affection and tradition, hemmed in the lives of English girls in those days. Perhaps she was among the first of that day in England to realize that the Christ, her Master, who sent Mary as His first messenger of the Resurrection, was in a fine sense of the word “unconventional,” even though He came that every jot and tittle of religious law might be _spiritually_ fulfilled. It was after her return to England from Germany that she published her little pamphlet on Kaiserswerth, from which quotations have already been given. Her next visit was to the Convent of St. Vincent de Paul in Paris, where the nursing was a part of the long-established routine, and while there she was able to visit the hospitals in Paris, and learned much from the Sisters in their organized work among the houses of the poor. In the midst of all this she was herself taken ill, and was nursed by the Sisters. Her direct and personal experience of their tender skill no doubt left its mark upon her own fitness. On her return home to complete her recovery, her new capacity and knowledge made a good deal of delighted talk in the cottages, and Mrs. Tooley tells us how it was rumoured that “Miss Florence could set a broken leg better than a doctor,” and made the old rheumatic folk feel young again with her remedies, to say nothing of her “eye lotions,” which “was enough to ruin the spectacle folk.” She was always ahead of her time in her belief in simple rules of health and diet and hatred of all that continual use of drugs which was then so much in fashion, and she no doubt saw many interesting experiments at Matlock Bank in helping Nature to do her own work. [Illustration: Florence Nightingale in 1854. (_From a drawing by H. M. B. C._)]