It was no light task for a young woman of thirty-three. She had under her about 50 nurses, 150 pauper “scourers,” and from 1220 to 1350 patients. The winters of 1865 and 1866 will long be remembered as the terrible period of the cotton famine in Lancashire. The workhouse infirmary at Liverpool was not only full, but overflowing; a number of patients often arrived when every bed was full. Then the gentle authority of Sister Agnes, as she was called, had to be exercised to induce the wild, rough patients to make way for one another. Sometimes she had to persuade them to let her put the beds together and place three or even four in two beds. The children had to be packed together, some at the head and some at the foot of the bed. She speaks of them as “nests of children,” and mentions that forty under twelve were sent in one day. This over-filling of the workhouse was of course no ordinary occurrence, and was due to the exceptional distress in Lancashire at that time. The number of deaths that took place, for the same reason, was unusually large. Sister Agnes speaks in one of her letters of seven deaths having occurred between Sunday night and Tuesday morning. The dreadful melancholy of the place bore upon her with terrible weight. There was not only the depressing thought that most of the inmates were there in consequence of their own wickedness or folly, but added to this the patients were isolated from friends and relatives whose visits do so much to cheer an ordinary hospital. There were patients with _delirium tremens_ wandering about the wards in their shirts; there were little children, some not more than seven, steeped in every kind of vice and infamy. “I sometimes wonder,” she wrote, in a moment of despair, “if there is a worse place on earth than Liverpool, and I am sure its workhouse is burdened with a large proportion of its vilest.”