Miss Nightingale’s London House ” 344 Florence Nightingale in her Last Days ” 352 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER FOR THE ELDERS IN MY AUDIENCE. It is my hope that my younger readers may find this volume all the more to their liking if it is not without interest to people of my own generation. Girls and boys of fourteen to sixteen are already on the threshold of manhood and womanhood, but even of children I am sure it is true that they hate to be “written down to,” since they are eagerly drinking in hopes and ideas which they cannot always put into words, and to such hopes and ideas they give eager sympathy of heart and curiosity of mind. [Illustration: Florence Nightingale’s Home, Embley Park, Romsey, Hants.] For one of her St. Thomas’s nurses, among the first nine women to be decorated with the Red Cross, the heroine of this story wrote what might well be the marching orders of many a good soldier in the divine army, and not least, perhaps, of those boy scouts and girl guides who would like better a life of adventure than the discipline of a big school or the “duties enough and little cares” of a luxurious home; and as the words have not, so far as I am aware, appeared in print before, it may be worth while to give them here:— “Soldiers,” she wrote, “must obey orders. And to you the ‘roughing’ it has been the resigning yourself to ‘comforts’ which you detested and to work which you did not want, while the work which wanted you was within reach. A severe kind of ‘roughing’ indeed—perhaps the severest, as I know by sad experience. “But it will not last. This short war is not life. But all will depend—your possible future in the work, we pray for you, O my Cape of Good Hope—upon the name you gain here. That name I know will be of one who obeys authority, however unreasonable, in the name of Him who is above all, and who is Reason itself—of one who submits to disagreeables, however unjust, for the work’s sake and for His who tells us to love those we don’t like—a precept I follow oh so badly—of one who never criticizes so that it can even be guessed at that she has criticism in her heart—and who helps her companions to submit by her own noble example.... “I have sometimes found in my life that the very hindrances I had been deploring were there expressly to fit me for the next step in my life. (This was the case—hindrances of _years_—before the Crimean War.)” And elsewhere she writes: “To have secured for you all the _circumstances_ we wished for your work, I would gladly have given my life. But you are made to rise above circumstances; perhaps this is God’s way—His ways are not as our ways—of preparing you for the great work which I am persuaded He has in store for you some day.”