“During my stay in the stores I saw numberless funerals pass by the window. Cholera was raging, and how I did wish to be in the wards amongst the poor dying soldiers! Before I leave the stores I must mention that Sister M. Agnes and myself thought the English nobility must have emptied their wardrobes and linen stores to send out bandages for the wounded—the most beautiful underclothing, the finest cambric sheets, with merely a scissors run here and there through them to ensure their being used for no other purpose. And such large bales, too; some from the Queen’s Palace, with the Royal monogram beautifully worked. Whoever sent out these immense bales thought nothing too good for the poor soldiers. And they were right—nothing was too good for them. And now good-bye stores and good-bye rats; for I was to be in the cholera wards in the morning. “Where shall I begin, or how can I ever describe my first day in the hospital at Scutari? Vessels were arriving, and the orderlies carrying the poor fellows, who, with their wounds and frost-bites, had been tossing about on the Black Sea for two or three days, and sometimes more. Where were they to go? Not an available bed. They were laid on the floor one after another, till the beds were emptied of those dying of cholera and every other disease. Many died immediately after being brought in—their moans would pierce the heart—the taking of them in and out of the vessels must have increased their pain. “The look of agony in those poor dying faces will never leave my heart. “Week in, week out, the cholera went on. The same remedies were continued, though almost always to fail. However, while there was life there was hope, and we kept on the warm applications to the last. When it came near the end the patients got into a sort of collapse, out of which they did not rally. “We begged the orderlies, waiting to take them to the dead-house, to wait a little lest they might not be dead; and with great difficulty we prevailed on them to make the least delay. As a rule the orderlies drank freely—‘to drown their grief,’ they said. I must say that their position was a very hard one—their work always increasing—and such work; death around them on every side; their own lives in continual danger—it was almost for them a continuation of the field of battle.