(_To her Father._) ... I send you some more documentary evidence--the tail of my Quarterly Report. My Committee are such children in administration that I am obliged to tell them such obvious truths as are contained in what _I make the Medical Men say_. This place is exactly like the administering of the Poor Law. We have cases of purely lazy fits and cases deserted by their families. And my Committee have not the courage to discharge a single case. _They_ say the Medical Men must do it. The Medical Men say _they_ won't, although the cases, they say, _must_ be discharged. And I always have to do it, as the stop-gap on all occasions. By such arts, and by such readiness to shoulder responsibility, Miss Nightingale reduced chaos to order, and her management of the Institution won praise in all quarters. It was hard work, for the Lady Superintendent was here, there, and everywhere, shepherding those who had cure of souls, managing the nurses, assisting at operations, checking waste in the coal-cellar or the larder. When a thing wanted to be done, she did it herself. Mrs. Herbert heard with anxiety that her friend had strained her back by lifting a patient, though she was suffering from lumbago at the time. There were smaller worries too. The British workman, and the British tradesman also, tried her sorely. "The chemists," she wrote to her father, "sent me a bottle of ether labelled S. spirits of nitre, which, if I had not smelt it, I should certainly have administered, and should have had an inquiry into poisoning. And the whole flue of a new gas-stove came down the second time of using it, which, if I had not caught it in my arms, would certainly have killed a patient." Then there were the anxieties necessarily incident to a nursing home. "We have had an awful disappointment," she wrote to her father (1854), "in a couching for a cataract, which has failed. The eye is lost (through _no_ fault of Bowman's), and I am left, after a most anxious watching, with a poor blind woman on my hands, whom we have blinded, and with a prospect of insanity. I had rather ten times have killed her. These are the cases, not those like the poor German who died, which make _our_ lives so anxious." What was afterwards to characterize her work in a larger field was already observed in Harley Street. It was the combination of masterful powers of organization with womanly gentleness and sympathy. Letters of gratitude, which she received from patients after their discharge from Harley Street, speak of her "unwearied and affectionate attention." They were often addressed to her as "My good, dear, and faithful Friend," or "My darling Mother." And a friend and mother she was indeed to many of the young women who came under her care. She had a large and influential circle of friends and acquaintances, and she was indefatigable in finding convalescent homes or sympathetic care, or openings in the Colonies, for those who