She returned to Balaclava, and next day went to install three nurses in the Sanatorium; and on her way up again visited the invalid officer in his lonely hut. During the succeeding days she continued her inspection of the hospitals in Balaclava, and also removed her quarters to the _London_, as the _Robert Lowe_, in which she sailed, was ordered home. It was when on board the _London_, while she was transacting business with one of her nursing staff, that Miss Nightingale was suddenly seized with alarming illness. The doctors pronounced it to be the worst form of Crimean fever, and ordered that she should be immediately taken up to the Sanatorium. She was laid on a stretcher, and tenderly carried by sad-eyed soldiers through Balaclava and up the mountain side amid general consternation. Her own private nurse, Mrs. Roberts, attended her, a friend held a large white umbrella to protect her face from the glaring sun, and poor Thomas, the page-boy, who had proudly called himself “Miss Nightingale’s man,” followed his mistress, crying piteously. So great was the lamenting crowd that it took an hour to get the precious burden up to the heights. A hut was selected near a small stream, the banks of which were gay with spring flowers, and there for the next few days Florence Nightingale lay in a most critical condition, assiduously nursed by Mrs. Roberts and attended by Drs. Henderson and Hadley. It seemed strange to every one that Miss Nightingale, after passing unscathed through her hard labours at Scutari, when she had been in daily contact with cholera and fever, should have succumbed to disease at Balaclava, but the fatigues of the past days, undertaken during excessive heat, accounted largely for the seizure, and some of her friends thought also that she had caught infection when visiting the sick officer on her way up to the Sanatorium. Alarmist reports quickly spread, and at Balaclava it was currently reported that Florence Nightingale was dying. The sad tidings were told at the Barrack Hospital at Scutari amidst the most pathetic scenes. The sick men turned their faces to the wall and cried like children. The news in due time reached London, and the leading articles in the papers of the time show that the public regarded the possible death of our heroine as a great national calamity. Happily the suspense was brief, and following quickly on the mournful tidings came the glad news that the worst symptoms were passed, and that in all human probability the precious life would be spared. Miss Nightingale, in a touching bit of autobiography, attributes her first step towards convalescence to the joy caused on receiving a bunch of wild-flowers.