Heroines That Every Child Should Know: Tales for Young People of the World's Heroines of All Ages
History
Heroines That Every Child Should Know: Tales for Young People of the World's Heroines of All Ages
Women heroes
"About six months afterward I happened to be at a railway station, and
saw a pointsman who had been in our hospital with an injured foot, but
who, as his friends wished to have him at home, had left before his
foot was cured. I inquired how his foot was. He replied that had it
not been for Sister Dora he would have lost his foot, if not his life.
I said, 'How did she save your foot when you were not in the hospital,
and she was ill at the time you left the hospital?' 'Well,' he
replied, 'you know my foot was far from well when I left the hospital;
there was no one at our house who could see to it properly, and it
took bad ways, and one evening I was in awful pain. Oh, how I did wish
for Sister Dora to come and dress it! I felt sure she could give me
relief, but I had been told she was very ill, so I had no hope that my
earnest desire would be realised; but while I was thinking and
wishing, the bedroom door was gently opened, and a figure just like
Sister Dora glided so softly into the room that I could not hear her,
but oh! she was so pale that I began to think it must be her spirit
but when she folded the bedclothes from off my foot, I knew it was
she. She dressed my foot, and from that hour it began to improve.'
"A few days after this interview with the pointsman I was talking to
Sister Dora, and said: 'By the bye, Sister, I have found out where you
went with the cab that day.' She replied with a merry twinkle in her
eye, 'What a long time you have been finding it out!'"
Her old patients ever remembered her with gratitude. A man called
Chell, an engine-stoker, was twice in the hospital under her care,
first with a dislocated ankle, severely cut; the second time with a
leg crushed to pieces in a railway accident. It was amputated.
According to his own account he remembered nothing of the operation,
except that Sister Dora was there, and that, "When I come to after the
chloroform, she was on her knees by my side with her arm supporting my
head, and she was repeating:
"'They climbed the steep ascent of heaven,
Through peril, toil and pain:
O God, to us may grace be given
To follow in their train.'
And all through the pain and trouble that I had afterward, I never
forgot Sister's voice saying those words." When she was in the
small-pox hospital, avoided by most, this man never failed to stump
away to it to see her and inquire how she was getting on.
There were, as she herself recognised, faults in the character of
Sister Dora; and yet, without these faults, problematical as it may
seem, it is doubtful whether she could have achieved all she did.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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