The Home had been languishing through mismanagement and lack of funds, and its new superintendent set to work with characteristic method. She got donations from her friends, inspired old subscribers with a new confidence, and managed to get the institution on its feet again, but not without a serious strain of overwork. A lady who visited her at this time speaks of the untiring labour which Miss Nightingale gave to the institution. “She was to be found,” she writes, “in the midst of the various duties of a hospital--for the Home was largely a sanatorium--organising the nurses, attending to the correspondence, prescriptions, and accounts; in short, performing all the duties of a hard-working matron as well as largely financing the institution.” Miss Nightingale shut herself off entirely from outside society and only occasionally received her most intimate friends. Her assiduity bore fruit in the improved state of the Home, not only on its comfort which she brought to it. The task of dealing with sick and querulous women, embittered and rendered sensitive and exacting by the unfortunate circumstances of their lives, was not an easy one, but Miss Nightingale had a calm and cheerful spirit which could bear with the infirmities of the weak. And so she laboured on in the dull house in Harley Street summer and winter, bringing order and comfort out of a wretched chaos and proving a real friend and helper to the sick and sorrow-laden women. At length the strain proved too much for her delicate body, and she was compelled most reluctantly to resign her task. Again she returned to Embley Park and Lea Hurst to recruit her health. When a few months later the supreme call of her life came and she was summoned to the work for which a special Providence seemed to have been preparing her from childhood, she was found ready. CHAPTER IX _SIDNEY, LORD HERBERT OF LEA_ Gladstone on Lord Herbert--Early Life of Lord Herbert--His Mother--College Career--Enters Public Life--As Secretary for War--Benevolent Work at Salisbury--Lady Herbert--Friendship with Florence Nightingale--Again Secretary for War. Formed on the good old plan, A true and brave and downright honest man. WHITTIER. None knew thee but to love thee, None named thee but to praise. HALLECK. “I wish,” wrote Gladstone to Richard Monckton-Milnes (afterwards Lord Houghton) in October, 1855, “that some one of the thousand who in prose justly celebrate Miss Nightingale would say a single word for the man of ‘routine’ who devised and projected her going--Sidney Herbert.”