“Her visage as regards expression is very remarkable, and one can almost anticipate by her countenance what she is about to say: alternately, with matters of the most grave importance, a gentle smile passes radiantly over her countenance, thus proving her evenness of temper; at other times, when wit or a pleasantry prevails, the heroine is lost in the happy, good-natured smile which pervades her face, and you recognize only the charming woman. Her dress is generally of a greyish or black tint; she wears a simple white cap, and often a rough apron. In a word, her whole appearance is religiously simple and unsophisticated. In conversation no member of the fair sex can be more amiable and gentle than Miss Nightingale. Removed from her arduous and cavalier-like duties, which require the nerve of a Hercules—and she possesses it when required—she is Rachel on the stage in both tragedy and comedy.” Soyer’s help and loyalty proved invaluable all through the campaign. His volume of memories adds a vivid bit of colour here and there to these pages. His own life had been romantic, and he saw everything from the romantic point of view. We read and know that although Sidney Herbert’s letter to Dr. Menzies, the principal medical officer at Scutari, asked that all regard should be paid to every wish of the Lady-in-Chief, and that was in itself a great means of power, the greatest power of all lay in her own personality and its compelling magnetism, which drew others to obedience. The attractive force of a strong, clear, comprehensive mind, and still more of a soul on fire with high purpose and deep compassion, which never wasted themselves in words, became tenfold the more powerful for the restraint and self-discipline which held all boisterous expression of them in check—her word, her very glance, “Winning its way with extreme gentleness Through all the outworks of suspicious pride.” Her strength was to be tried to the uttermost; for scarcely had her work in the hospital begun when cholera came stalking over the threshold. Day and night among the dying and the dead she and her nurses toiled with fearless devotion, each one carrying her life in her hand, but seldom, indeed, even thinking of that in the heroic struggle to save as many other lives as possible. Miss Nightingale long afterwards, when talking of services of a far easier kind, once said to a professional friend that no one was fit to be a nurse who did not really enjoy precisely those duties of a sick-room which the ordinary uneducated woman counts revolting; and if she was, at this time, now and then impatient with stupidity and incompetence and carelessness, that is not wonderful in one whose effort was always at high level, and for whom every detail was of vivid interest, because she realized that often on exactitude in details hung the balance between life and death.