revealed at length in loving beauty by a wife's and mother's experience, she might have come home the woman she had often made us dream of. We see the shadow of it all in that little picture which once hung on the walls of the Boston Athenæum; and, God willing, we shall yet encounter the glad reality beyond the reach of tempests, beyond the need of wreck, lifted into true deserving of so great a privilege on the broad ocean of an Infinite Love! Florence Nightingale is no exception in the history of her sex, only a consummate flower of its daily bloom. Ever since the commencement of the Christian era, whole armies of women have devoted themselves, not for a few years only, like Florence Nightingale, but for their whole lives long, to the same painful duties,--women who organized their bands with an efficiency and thoroughness, felt to this very day, and which made them the competent instructors of Florence Nightingale in the Crimea. The holiest vocation fails to instruct the unprepared mind. The soil of the nineteenth century is fallow; but in the year 385 a saintly woman traversed those same Crimean shores. Of her it was written:-- "She was marvellous debonaire and piteous to them that were sicke and comforted them, and served them right humbly, and gave them largely to eat, such as they asked; but to herself she was hard in her sickness and scarce, for she refused to eat flesh, how well she gave it to others, and also to drink wine. She was oft by them that were sicke, and she laid the pillows aright and in point, and she rubbed their feet, and boiled water to wash them; and it seemed to her that the less she did to the sicke in service, so much the less service did she to God, and deserved the less mercy; therefore she was to them piteous, and nothing to herself." The Church canonized this woman, who carried her own substance to the work in which the British Government sustained Florence Nightingale so many centuries later; but the public mind was not prepared, so the world has never rung to the name of Santa Paula. Florence Nightingale's most heroic service lay in breaking open the storehouses at Scutari. It may have cost her very little, but at that moment the force of accumulated character made itself felt. An everlasting reproach to all cowards of circumlocution offices, the duty not a single commissioned officer had courage to assume has gently crowned the woman with the woven suffrages of the world. The name of Mary Patton has with us also a true educational power. There was no obstacle nor vulgar prejudice which this heroic girl was not called to combat. Not twenty years old, with two little children clinging to her skirts, and the great primal sorrow of her sex overshadowing her afresh, with her husband bereft of reason, and neither nurse nor physician at hand, she kept the ship's reckoning, overpowered a mutinous mate, and carried her vessel triumphantly in to the destined port.