It needs no words to picture the gratitude of the women to the dear Lady-in-Chief who sought them out in their abject misery, gave them decent clothing and food from her own stores in the Nurses’s Tower, and saw that the little lives ushered into the world amid the horrors and privations of war had at least tender care. At the end of January, owing to a broken drain in the basement, fever broke out, and Miss Nightingale now persuaded the Commandant to remove the women to healthier quarters. A Turkish house was procured by requisition and Miss Nightingale had it cleaned and furnished out of her funds. Throughout the winter the women were assisted with money, food and clothes, and outfits were provided for widows returning home. Miss Nightingale also organised a plan to give employment to all the soldiers’ wives who were willing to work in her laundry at ten shillings to fourteen shillings a week. The upper part of the wash-house was divided into a sick ward and a laundry, and offered a refuge for the more respectable women. She obtained situations for others in families in Constantinople. A school was also started for the children. Lady Alicia Blackwood, wife of Dr. Blackwood, an army chaplain, visited the women and helped to care for them. Through Miss Nightingale’s initiative about five hundred women were raised from their wretched condition at Scutari and enabled to earn honest livings. “When,” wrote Miss Nightingale later, “the improvements in our system which the war must suggest are discussed, let not the wife and child of the soldier be forgotten.” While Florence Nightingale was thus heroically grappling with disease, suffering, and death, and bringing order out of chaos in the hospitals at Scutari, small-minded fanatics at home were attacking her religious opinions. Some declared that she had gone to the East for the purpose of spreading Puseyism amongst the British soldiers, others that she had become a Roman Catholic, some people were certain that she was a Unitarian, while others whispered the dreadful heresy, “Supralapsarian.” A clergyman warned his flock against subscribing money for the soldiers in the East if it was to pass through Popish hands. Controversy waxed strong in _The Times_ and _The Standard_, and Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Herbert warmly defended their absent friend. “It is melancholy to think,” wrote Mrs. Herbert to a lady parishioner of an attacking clergyman, “that in Christian England no one can undertake anything without these most uncharitable and sectarian attacks, and, had you not told me so, I could scarcely believe that a clergyman of the Established Church could have been the mouthpiece of such slander. Miss Nightingale is a member of the Established Church of England, and what is called rather Low Church, but ever since she went to Scutari her religious opinions and character have been assailed on all points. It is a cruel return to make towards one to whom all England owes so much.”