She was born at Cambridge, of Irish parents, in 1832. Her father was a colonel in the 12th Regiment, and her descent was from the north Irish stock that has furnished so many great names to the roll-call of the worthies of our nation. She was a Protestant evangelical, of the type which northern Ireland produces. It is easy to label the religious sect to which she belonged as narrow and unattractive; but however this may be, as exemplified in her personally, her religion was too intense a reality to be unattractive. It permeated her whole life, from the time when as a child of seven her dream was to become a missionary, to the hour when she died of typhus taken from a patient in the Liverpool Infirmary to whom she had given up her own room and bed. Another deep and permanent influence on her mind and character was her love for Ireland. Over and over again in her letters we come across expressions which show how close to her heart lay her country’s good. The training at Kaiserswerth was intended to be utilised for the good of Ireland. “I have no desire,” she wrote, “to become a deaconess; that would not, I think, be the place I should be called upon to occupy. No, my own Ireland first. It was for Ireland’s good that my first desire to be used as a blessed instrument in God’s hand was breathed, ... and in Ireland is it my heart’s desire to labour....” In another letter she refers to the time when she “then and there” dedicated herself to do what she could for Ireland, in its workhouses, infirmaries, and hospitals. In another place she speaks of being retained in England for another year’s training, and exclaims, “My last English sojourn, I hope, as Ireland is ever my bourn!” And again, “My heart is ever in Ireland, where I hope ultimately to work.” Her heart’s desire was never gratified; she laid down her life, at the age of thirty-five, in the Liverpool Workhouse, before she had had an opportunity of giving to her own dear land the benefit of all she had learned by the patient years of training at Kaiserswerth and in London. Ulster Protestant as she was to the backbone, and a member of the Church of England, she was a true patriot, and showed her patriotism by labouring with self-denying earnestness to fit herself to lift up to a higher level an important branch of the social life of her country. She was very much stimulated, as so many women were, by the heroism of the Nightingale band of nurses who left England for the Crimea in 1854. She listened with vehement inward dissent to those who cast contempt and blame on them, and, in her own words, “almost worshipped” their brave leader.