As soon as her convalescence was over she visited London hospitals, and in the autumn of 1852 those of Edinburgh and Dublin, having spent a part of the interval in her home at Embley, where she had again the pleasure of being near her friends the Herberts, with whose neighbourly work among the poor she was in fullest sympathy. Her first post was at the Harley Street Home for Sick Governesses. She had been interested in many kinds of efforts on behalf of those who suffer; Lord Shaftesbury’s Ragged School labours, for instance, had appealed to her, and to that and other like enterprises she had given the money earned by her little book on Kaiserswerth. But she always had in view the one clear and definite aim—to fit herself in every possible way for competent nursing. It was on August 12, 1853, that she became Superintendent of the Harley Street institution, which is now known as the Florence Nightingale Hospital. It was founded in 1850 by Lady Canning, as a Home for Invalid Gentlewomen, and when an appeal was made to Miss Nightingale for money and good counsel, she gave in addition _herself_ and became for a time the Lady Superintendent. The hospital was intended mainly for sick governesses, for whom the need of such a home of rest and care and surgical help had sometimes arisen, but it had been mismanaged and was in danger of becoming a failure. There Miss Nightingale, we read, was to be found “in the midst of various duties of a hospital—for the Home was largely a sanatorium—organizing the nurses, attending to the correspondence, prescriptions, and accounts; in short, performing all the duties of a hard-working matron, as well as largely financing the institution.” “The task of dealing with sick and querulous women,” says Mrs. Tooley, “embittered and rendered sensitive and exacting by the unfortunate circumstances of their lives, was not an easy one, but Miss Nightingale had a calm and cheerful spirit which could bear with the infirmities of the weak. And so she laboured on in the dull house in Harley Street, summer and winter, bringing order and comfort out of a wretched chaos, and proving a real friend and helper to the sick and sorrow-laden women. “At length the strain proved too much for her delicate body, and she was compelled most reluctantly to resign her task.”