All about Lea Hurst, in many and many a pleasant cottage home, those
little gifts are treasured to-day like the relics of some blessed saint;
which indeed is just what they are. The saint is still living, and some
of the children of the school feasts are living, too, and now in their
age will show with pride and joy the gifts they received long ago from
the hands of the beloved Miss Florence.
As Florence grew up to womanhood she found more and more work to do.
There were mills and factories in the neighborhood of Lea Hurst; and in
the hosiery mills, especially, hundreds of women and girls were
employed, many of whom lived on the Nightingale estate.
She may have been seventeen or eighteen when she started her Bible class
for the young women of the district, holding it in the tiny ancient
chapel at Lea Hurst which I described in the first chapter. Gathering
the girls around her, she would read a chapter from the Bible, and then
give them her thoughts about it, and explain the difficult passages;
then they would all sing together, her sweet, clear voice leading the
hymns. Here is another memory very precious to the old women who were
once those happy girls. They love to tell "how beautifully Miss Florence
used to talk."
Long years after, when Miss Nightingale, spent with her noble labors,
would come to Lea Hurst for a time of rest and refreshment, the
daughters of these girls counted it a high privilege to gather on the
lawn under her window and sing to her as she sat in the room above; and
would go home proud and happy as queens if they had seen the saintly
face smiling from the window.
Shall I try to show you Florence Nightingale at seventeen? Her face was
little changed from that of the girl we saw in the cottage, cheering old
Goody Brown. She still wore her hair brushed smoothly "Madonna-wise" on
either side her face; often, now, she wore a rose at the side, tucked in
among the shining braids or coils. You would think her frocks very queer
if you saw them to-day, but then they were extremely pretty; full skirts
(no crinoline! that was to come later) and full sleeves, with broad flat
collar of lace or embroidery. When she went to church or to make visits
she wore a spencer, a kind of full plaited jacket with a belt, something
like a Norfolk jacket--only different! and a Leghorn bonnet. You have
seen pictures of the Leghorn bonnets of the Thirties and Forties;
"coal-scuttles," some people called them, and they were something the
shape of a scuttle. Some of them were enormous in size, and they look
queer enough now in the pictures, or--if your grandmamma had a way of
keeping things--in the "dress-up" trunk or cupboard in the attic. But
people who were young in those days tell me that they were extremely
becoming, and that a pretty face never looked prettier that when it
peeped out from the depths of a huge straw "coal-scuttle."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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