“She even did more. By the very power of her fame, but also, I believe, by the wisdom and the authority of her counsels, she founded, if so one may speak, a gracious dynasty that still reigns supreme in the wards where sufferers lie, and even brings solace, brings guidance, brings hope, into those dens of misery that, until the blessing has reached them, seem only to harbour despair. When into the midst of such scenes the young high-bred lady now glides, she wears that same sacred armour—the gentle attire of the servitress—which seemed ‘heavenly’ in the eyes of our soldiers at the time of the war, and finds strength to meet her dire task, because she knows by tradition what the first of the dynasty proved able to confront and to vanquish in the wards of the great Barrack Hospital.” In everything a woman’s hand and brain had been needed. It was, for instance, of little use to receive in the evening, after barrack fires were out, food which had been asked for from the supplies for some meal several hours earlier; yet that, it appears, was the sort of thing that happened. And too much of the food officially provided, even when it did reach the patients at last, had been unfit for use. As for the question of laundry, a washing contract that had only succeeded in washing seven shirts for two or three thousand men could not have been permitted to exist under any feminine management. Nor could any trained or knowledgeable nurse have allowed for a single day the washing of infectious bed-linen in one common tub with the rest. Yet this had been the condition of affairs before the Lady-in-Chief came on the scenes. In speaking of her work among the soldiers’ wives it has already been noted how she quickly hired and fitted up a house close to the hospital as a laundry, where under sanitary regulations 500 shirts and 150 other articles were washed every week. Then there arose the practical question of what could be done for the poor fellows who had no clothes at all except the grimy and blood-stained garments in which they arrived, and we are told that in the first three months, out of her own private funds, she provided the men with ten thousand shirts. The drugs had all been in such confusion that once when Mrs. Bracebridge had asked three times for chloride of lime and been assured that there was none, Miss Nightingale insisted on a thorough search, and not less than ninety pounds of it were discovered. The semi-starvation of many hospital patients before Miss Nightingale’s arrival, noted on an earlier page, was chiefly the result of mismanagement—mismanagement on the part of those who meant well—often, indeed, meant the very best within their power, but among whom there was, until her coming, no central directing power, with brain and heart alike capable and energizing and alive to all the vital needs of deathly illness—alert with large foreseeing outlook, yet shrewd and swift in detail.