Miss Nightingale watched the progress of the home with keen interest and gave her advice from time to time. She was also actively engaged in promoting workhouse reform. A sick pauper was to her a human being, not a “chattel” to be handed over to the tender mercies of the Mr. Bumbles and Mrs. Corneys. It afforded her great satisfaction that two out of the first lot of nurses which left her St. Thomas’s Training School went as matrons to workhouse infirmaries. A reform in workhouse hospitals had been brought about by Mr. Gathorne-Hardy’s Metropolitan Poor Act of 1867. But the introduction of trained nurses on the Nightingale system grew directly out of the experience and information which followed the founding of the Liverpool Training Home. Hitherto the workhouse nurses were the pauper women, untrustworthy and unskilled. At Brownlow Hill, Liverpool, Infirmary Mr. Rathbone relates that there were twelve hundred beds occupied by people in all stages of every kind of disease, and the only assistants of the two women officers who superintended the nursing were pauper women who were as untrustworthy as they were unskilful. This was a fair example of workhouse infirmaries all over the country. The Select Vestry of Liverpool, having received an anonymous offer to defray the cost of the experiment for three years, consented to try Miss Nightingale’s plan. With her assistance, Miss Agnes Jones, a lady who had been trained at Kaiserswerth like Miss Nightingale, and also at the Nightingale School at St. Thomas’s, was appointed Lady Superintendent, and she brought with her a staff of twelve nurses from St. Thomas’s. At first Miss Jones tried to get extra help by training the able-bodied pauper women as nurses, but out of fifty-six not one proved able to pass the necessary examination and, worse still, the greater number used their first salary to get drunk. The painful fact was established that not a single respectable and trustworthy nurse could be found amongst the workhouse inmates, and the infirmary nursing had to be taken entirely out of their hands. After a two years’ trial Miss Jones’s experiment with her trained and educated nurses proved so satisfactory that the guardians determined never to return to the old system, and to charge the rates with the permanent establishment of the new one. To the deep regret of every one, however, Miss Agnes Jones sank under the labours which she had undertaken, and died in February, 1868. Miss Nightingale contributed a beautiful tribute to the memory of her friend and fellow worker in _Good Words_ for June, 1868, under the title “Una and the Lion,” which subsequently formed the “Introduction” to _The Memorials of Agnes Elizabeth Jones_, by her sister.