In the end, then, the scope of Miss Nightingale's experiment was considerably enlarged; and the deeper significance of the episode is to be found in the emphasis which it throws upon the novelty and difficulties of Miss Nightingale's enterprise. In these days, nurses, trained and distinctively attired, are so much part of everyday life, women-nurses serving under the Red Cross are so normal a feature of war, and Territorial nurses, smartly uniformed, are so familiar a unit of auxiliary forces, that some effort of imagination is required to realize the conditions which existed sixty years ago. We remember that a staff of nearly 800 female nurses was maintained for service in the South African War, and may be tempted to smile at the question between 20 and 40, or 40 and 90 for the Crimea. But it was Miss Nightingale who showed the way, and the way of the pioneer is rough. No one who reads this volume will suspect her of timidity, or think her wanting in self-confidence; yet so conscious was she of the difficulties that in this instance she under-rated her power, and was anxious to keep the experiment within much narrower limits than it assumed. Her original idea had been to limit the number of female nurses to 20, but at various dates after Miss Stanley's arrival she sent home for more nurses, and, before the war was over, she had had control of 125. III Miss Nightingale's reluctance to assume the superintendence of additional nurses will be the more readily understood when we pass to the multifarious duties which circumstances led her to discharge. "Having understood," she wrote to Lord Stratford de Redcliffe (Nov. 7), "that Your Excellency has the power of drawing upon Government for the uses of the sick and wounded, I beg to state that there is at present a great deficiency of linen among the men in the Hospitals until the Government Stores can arrive and be appropriated to them. A hundred pairs of sheets and 200 shirts might be applied to such a temporary purpose, and would never be _de trop_. Also a few American stoves, upon which we might prepare delicate food for the worst cases, who require to be fed every two or three hours, which is of course impossible for the Medical Officers and Orderlies to attend to; many deaths are necessarily the consequence."