“Time must be at a discount with the man who can adjust the balance of such an important question as the above, and I for one have none, as you will easily suppose when I tell you that on Thursday last we had 1,175 sick and wounded in this hospital (among whom 120 cholera patients), and 650 severely wounded in the other building, called the General Hospital, of which we also have charge, when a message came to me to prepare for 510 wounded on our side of the hospital, who were arriving from the dreadful affair of November 5, from Balaclava, in which battle were 1,763 wounded and 442 killed, besides 96 officers wounded and 38 killed. I always expected to end my days as a hospital matron, but I never expected to be barrack mistress. We had but half an hour’s notice before they began landing the wounded. Between one and nine o’clock we had the mattresses stuffed, sewn up, laid down (alas! only upon matting on the floor), the men washed and put to bed, and all their wounds dressed. “We are very lucky in our medical heads. Two of them are brutes and four are angels—for this is a work which makes either angels or devils of men, and of women too. As for the assistants, they are all cubs, and will, while a man is breathing his last breath under the knife, lament the ‘annoyance of being called up from their dinners by such a fresh influx of wounded.’ But unlicked cubs grow up into good old bears, though I don’t know how; for certain it is, the old bears are good. We have now four miles of beds and not eighteen inches apart. “We have our quarters in one tower of the barracks, and all this fresh influx has been laid down between us and the main guard, in two corridors, with a line of beds down each side, just room for one person to pass between, and four wards. Yet in the midst of this appalling horror (we are steeped up to our necks in blood) there is good—and I can truly say, like St. Peter, ‘It is good for us to be here’—though I doubt whether, if St. Peter had been there, he would have said so.” Meanwhile England, stirred to its depths by the accounts given by Mr. William Howard Russell, of the sufferings of our soldiers, had begged the _Times_, in whose pages his letters appeared, to receive funds and send them out by the hand of Mr. Macdonald, a man of vigour, firmness, and good sense, and “loyally devoted to his duty.” Before leaving England, he saw the Inspector-General of the army, Dr. Andrew Smith, and also the Duke of Newcastle, but was assured that Government had already provided so amply for the sick and wounded that his fund was not likely to be needed. When he reached the Bosphorus all the official people there talked to him in the same strain. But there leaked out through an officer on duty one little fact that showed how much such assurances were worth.