It was a meeting of kindred spirits, but of distinct individualities. We do not find Miss Nightingale making any attempt to take up the mantle fast falling from the experienced philanthropist: she had her own line of pioneer work forming in her capable brain, but was eager to glean something from the wide experience through which her revered friend had passed. Mrs. Fry had during the past few years been visiting prisons and institutions on the Continent, and had established a small training home for nurses in London. She was a friend of Pastor Fliedner, the founder of Kaiserswerth, and had visited that institution. The account of his work, and of the order of Protestant deaconesses which he had founded for tending the sick poor, given by Mrs. Fry, made a profound impression on Florence Nightingale, and resulted a few years later in her enrolment as a voluntary nurse at that novel institution. In the meantime she studied the hospital system at home, spending some months in the leading London hospitals and visiting those in Edinburgh and Dublin. Then she undertook a lengthened tour abroad and saw the different working of institutions for the sick in France, Germany, and Italy. The comparison was not favourable to this country. The nursing in our hospitals was largely in the hands of the coarsest type of women, not only untrained, but callous in feeling and often grossly immoral. There was little to counteract their baneful influence, and the atmosphere of institutions which, as the abodes of the sick and dying, had special need of spiritual and elevating influences, was of a degrading character. The occasional visits of a chaplain could not do very much to counteract the behaviour of the unprincipled nurse ever at the bedside. The habitual drunkenness of these women was then proverbial, while the dirt and disorder rampant in the wards was calculated to breed disease. The “profession,” if the nursing of that day can claim a title so dignified, had such a stigma attaching to it that no decent woman cared to enter it, and if she did, it was more than likely that she would lose her character. In contrast to this repulsive class of women, whom Miss Nightingale had encountered to her horror in the hospitals of London, Edinburgh, and Dublin, and to the “Sairey Gamps” who were the only “professional” nurses available for the middle classes in their own homes, she found on the Continent the sweet-faced Sister of Charity--pious, educated, trained.