But however quiet the setting forth, the arrival at Boulogne could not be kept a secret, and the enthusiasm of our French allies for those who were going to nurse the wounded made the little procession a heart-moving triumph. A merry band of white-capped fishwives met the boat and, seizing all the luggage, insisted on doing everything for nothing. Boxes on their backs and bags in their hands, they ran along in their bright petticoats, pouring out their hearts about their own boys at the front, and asking only the blessing of a handshake as the sole payment they would take. Then, as Miss Nightingale’s train whistled its noisy way out of the station, waving their adieus while the tears streamed down the weather-beaten cheeks of more than one old wife, they stood and watched with longing hearts. At Paris there was a passing visit to the Mother-house of Miss Nightingale’s old friends, the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul, and a little call on Lady Canning, also an old friend, who writes of her as “happy and stout-hearted.” The poor “Angels” had a terrible voyage to Malta, for the wind, as with St. Paul, was “contrary” and blew a hurricane dead against them, so that their ship, the _Vectis_, had something of a struggle to escape with its many lives. They touched at Malta on October 31, 1854, and soon afterwards set sail again for Constantinople. What an old-world story it seems now to talk of “setting sail”! On the 4th of November, the day before the battle of Inkermann, they had reached their goal, and had their work before them at Scutari. A friend of mine who knows Scutari well has described it in summer as a place of roses, the very graves wreathed all over with the blossoming briars of them; and among those graves she found a nameless one, on which, without revealing identity, the epitaph stated, in the briefest possible way, that this was the grave of a hospital matron, adding in comment the words spoken of Mary when she broke the alabaster box—and in this instance full of pathos—the six words, “She hath done what she could.” And I find from one of Miss Nightingale’s letters that it was she herself who inscribed those words. Unspeakable indeed must have been the difficulties with which any previous hospital matron had to contend, rigid and unbreakable for ordinary fingers the red tape by which she must have been bound. On this subject Kinglake has written words which are strong indeed in their haunting sincerity. He writes of an “England officially typified that swathes her limbs round with red tape,” and of those who, though dogged in routine duty, were so afraid of any new methods that they were found “surrendering, as it were, at discretion, to want and misery” for those in their care. “But,” he adds, “happily, after a while, and in gentle, almost humble, disguise which put foes of change off their guard, there acceded to the State a new power.