He went to Scutari, and here at first it was the same thing. He offered his aid to the chief medical authority over the hospitals; the reply was calm and precise: "Nothing was wanted!" He went still higher, to "another and more august quarter"; the answer was still more emphatic: there was no possible occasion for help; soldiers and sailors had everything they required; if he wished to dispose of the _Times_ fund, it might be a good thing to build an English church at Pera! "Yet, at that very time," says the historian of the Crimea, "wants so dire as to include want of hospital furniture and of shirts for the patients, and of the commonest means for maintaining cleanliness, were afflicting our stricken soldiery in the hospitals."[6] Mr. McDonald did not build an English church; instead, he went to the Barrack Hospital and asked for the Lady-in-Chief. I should like to have seen Florence Nightingale's face when she heard his story. No help needed? The soldiers supplied with everything they needed? Everything "all right"? "Come with me!" she said. She took him through the wards of the Barrack Hospital, and showed him what had been done, and what an immense deal was yet to do; how, though many were comfortably clad, yet fresh hundreds were arriving constantly, half naked, without a shred of clean or decent clothing on their backs; how far the demand was beyond the supply; how fast her own stores were dwindling, and how many of the private offerings were unsuitable for the needs they were sent to fill; how many men were still, after all her labors, lying on the floor because there were not beds enough to go round. All these things good Mr. McDonald saw, and laid to heart; but he saw other things besides. Perhaps some of you have visited a hospital. You have seen the bright, fresh, pleasant rooms, the rows of snowy cots, the bright faces of the nurses, here and there flowers and pictures; seeing two or three hundred patients, it has seemed to you as if you had seen all the sick people in the world. Was it not so? In the Barrack Hospital (and this, remember, was but one of eight, and these eight the English hospitals alone!) there were two or three thousand patients; it was a City of Pain. Its streets were long, narrow rooms or corridors, bare and gloomy; no furniture save the endless rows of cots and mattresses, "packed like sardines," as one eye-witness says; its citizens, men in every stage of sickness and suffering; some tossing in fever and delirium; some moaning in pain that even a soldier's strength could not bear silently; some ghastly with terrible wounds; some sinking into their final sleep. Following the light, slight figure of his guide through these narrow streets of the City of Pain, McDonald saw and noted that