The gratitude and devotion of the patients to her knew no bounds. At nights she used to pass through the long corridors, and the endless wards—there were four miles of wards in the hospital—carrying a little lamp in her hand, so as to see that all was well, and from this the patients learnt to call her “the lady of the lamp.” They felt that she was their good angel, and one of them said afterwards, describing the comfort it was even to see her pass, “She would speak to one and another, and nod and smile to many more, but she could not do it to all for we lay there by hundreds; but we would kiss her shadow as it fell, and lay our heads on the pillow again content.” Huddled together in two or three damp rooms in the basement of the hospital, Miss Nightingale found a great number of poor women, the wives of the soldiers, with their babies, living in the utmost misery and discomfort. She did not rest till she had arranged better quarters for them. Some ladies were found to befriend them. Those whose husbands had been killed in the war were sent back to England, many were given work in the laundry which Miss Nightingale had started, and a school was opened for the children. [Illustration: FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE IN ONE OF THE WARDS OF THE HOSPITAL AT SCUTARI.] When the winter came on, the sufferings of the soldiers increased. The army was engaged in the siege of Sevastopol, and Miss Nightingale described the sufferings endured by the soldiers there in a letter to a friend: “Fancy working five nights out of seven in the trenches! Fancy being thirty-six hours in them at a stretch, with no food but raw salt pork sprinkled with sugar, rum, and biscuit; nothing hot ... fancy through all this the army preserving their courage and patience as they have done. There is something sublime in the spectacle.” The hospitals were crowded with men brought in ill from the results of this exposure. Early in 1855 fifty more trained nurses were sent out from England, and they came in time to help in a terrible outbreak of cholera which filled the hospital with new patients, most of whom died after a few hours’ suffering. Frost-bitten men were brought in too from Sevastopol, and of all these sufferers at least half died in spite of the care of the nurses. Again and again it was Miss Nightingale who comforted the dying and received from them the last message to be sent to the dear ones at home. She wrote down their words and took care of their watches or other possessions which they wished to send home.