On their first arrival she and her nurses may, no doubt, have had to bear cold-shouldering and jealousy; but in the long agony of the cholera visitation they were welcomed as veritable angels of light. It would be easy to be sensational in describing the scenes amid which they moved, for before long the hospital was filled, day and night, with two long processions: on one side came in those who carried the sick men in on their stretchers, and on the other side those who carried out the dead. The orderlies could not have been trusted to do the nursing that was required; the “stuping”—a professional method of wholesale hot fomentations and rubbings to release the iron rigidity of the cholera patient’s body—was best done by skilled and gentle hands, and even in _such_ hands, so bad were the surrounding conditions—the crowding, the bad drainage, the impure water—that, despite the utmost devotion, only a small proportion of lives could be saved. It was especially at this time that the feeling towards the Lady-in-Chief deepened into a trust that was almost worship. Watchful, resourceful, unconquered, with a mind that, missing no detail, yet took account of the widest issues and the farthest ends, she was yet full of divine tenderness for each sufferer whom with her own hands she tended; and, although she did not nurse the officers—she left that to others—in her devotion to Tommy Atkins she had been known to be on her feet, as already has been said, for twenty hours on end; and, whether she was kneeling or standing, stooping or lifting, always an ideal nurse. The graves round the hospitals were not dug deep enough, and the air became even fouler than before. To the inroads of cholera the suffering of Sebastopol patients added a new form of death. Sister Aloysius writes of these men who came in by scores and hundreds from the trenches, and whom this Sister, greatly valued by the Lady-in-Chief, helped to nurse both at Scutari and at Balaclava:— “I must say something of my poor frost-bitten patients. The men who came from the ‘front,’ as they called it, had only thin linen suits, no other clothing to keep out the Crimean frost of 1854-5. When they were carried in on the stretchers which conveyed so many to their last resting-place, their clothes had to be cut off. In most cases the flesh and clothes were frozen together; and, as for the feet, the boots had to be cut off bit by bit, the flesh coming off with them; many pieces of the flesh I have seen remain in the boot. “We have just received some hundreds of poor creatures, worn out with sufferings beyond any you could imagine, in the Crimea, where the cold is so intense that a soldier described to me the Russians and the Allies in a sudden skirmish, and neither party able to draw a trigger! So fancy what the poor soldiers must endure in the ‘trenches.’