comforts and refinements of a wealthy home to be of service to them. Her slight delicate form, her steady nerve, her kindly conciliating manner, and her absolute self-devotion, awoke a passion of chivalrous feeling on the part of the men she tended. Sometimes a soldier would refuse to submit to a painful but necessary operation until a few calm sentences of hers seemed at once to allay the storm, and the man would submit willingly to the ordeal he had to undergo. One soldier said, “Before she came here, there was such cursin’ and swearing, and after that it was as holy as a church.” Another said to Mr. Sidney Herbert, “She would speak to one and another, and nod and smile to many more; but she could not do it to all, you know—we lay there in hundreds—but we could kiss her shadow as it fell, and lay our heads on the pillow again, content.” This incident, of the wounded soldier turning to kiss her shadow as it passed, has been woven into a beautiful poem by Longfellow. It is called “Santa Filomena.” The fact that she had been born in, and had been named after, the city of Florence, may have suggested to the poet to turn her name into the language of the country of her birth. Miss Nightingale suffered from an attack of hospital fever in the spring of 1855, but as soon as possible she returned to her laborious post, and never quitted it till the war was over and the last of our soldiers was on his way home. When she returned to England she received such a welcome as probably has fallen to no other woman; all distinctions of party and of rank were forgotten in the one wish to do her honour. She was presented by the Queen with a jewel in commemoration of her work in the Crimea, and a national testimonial was set on foot, to which a sum of £50,000 was subscribed. It is unnecessary to say that Miss Nightingale did not accept this testimonial for her own personal benefit. The sum was devoted to the permanent endowment of schools for the training of nurses in St. Thomas’s and King’s College Hospitals. Since the Crimea no European war has taken place without calling forth the service of trained bands of skilled nurses. Within ten years of Florence Nightingale’s labours in the East, the nations of Europe agreed at the Geneva Convention upon certain rules and regulations, with the object of ameliorating the condition of the sick and wounded in war. By this convention all ambulances and military hospitals were neutralised, and their inmates and staff were henceforth to be regarded as non-combatants. The distinguishing red cross of the Geneva Convention is now universally recognised as the one civilised element in the savagery of war.