There is little doubt that the fund would have reached the £50,000 which the Committee had set itself to obtain if Miss Nightingale, after her return home, had not herself brought the subscription list to a close in order that public benevolence might be diverted to the fund raised to help the victims of the devastating inundations in France in 1857. Miss Nightingale had seen with great admiration the self-sacrificing work of French ladies and sisters amongst the soldiers in the Crimea, and had been supported in her own efforts by the sympathy of commanding officers of the French troops, so that it gave her peculiar pleasure to promote a fund for helping our late allies when distress came upon their country. Meantime, the heroine whose work had evoked the great outburst of national gratitude of which the Nightingale Fund was the expression, still remained in the East, to complete her work, for though the fall of Sebastopol had brought the war to an end, the sick and wounded soldiers still lay in the hospitals, and there was an army of occupation in the Crimea pending the conclusion of the peace negotiations. None knew better than Miss Nightingale the evils which beset soldiers in camp when the exigencies of active warfare no longer occupy them, and she now divided her attention between administering to the sick and providing recreation and instruction for the convalescents and the soldiers in camp. As soon as her health was sufficiently established after the attack of fever, she again left Scutari for the Crimea. Two new camp hospitals, known as the “Left Wing” and the “Right Wing,” consisting of huts, had been put up on the heights above Balaclava, not far from the Sanatorium, and Miss Nightingale established a staff of nurses there, and took the superintendence of the nursing department. She lived in a hut consisting of three rooms with a medical store attached, situated by the Sanatorium and conveniently near the new camp hospitals. Three of the Roman Catholic sisters who had been working at Scutari accompanied Miss Nightingale to the Crimea, and writing from the hut encampment there to some of the sisters who remained at Scutari, she says: “I want my ‘Cardinal’ (a name bestowed on a valued sister) very much up here. The sisters are all quite well and cheerful, thank God for it! They have made their hut look quite tidy, and put up with the cold and inconveniences with the utmost self-abnegation. Everything, even the ink, freezes in our hut every night.”