This matrimonial deluge carried off six of her best nurses.[163] [163] _Blackwood_, p. 232. III Such, then, was Miss Nightingale's position; and one can understand the amused contempt with which she heard of the picture drawn of her in certain quarters as a conspirator in a Tractarian or Romanist plot. But she was a practical person, and, though herself broad-minded, took stock of a narrower world as she found it. She was intensely desirous of making her experiment of woman nurses a success, and she felt acutely the danger of wrecking it by even the suspicion of sectarian prejudice. This fact supplies a further explanation of the alarm with which she received the coming of the second party of nurses under Miss Stanley.[164] It included a batch of fifteen nuns. "The proportion of R. Catholics," she wrote to Mr. Herbert, "which is already making an outcry, you have increased to 25 in 84. Mr. Menzies [the Principal Medical Officer] has declared that he will have two only at the General Hospital, and I cannot place them here [in the Barrack Hospital] in a greater proportion than I have done, without exciting the suspicion of the Medical Men and others." The difficulty was ultimately adjusted, but only at the cost of infinite trouble and worry to Miss Nightingale. Her letters to Mr. Herbert are full of references to the subject, some of them very amusing, and perhaps it was her lively sense of humour that helped to carry her through this religious difficulty. "Such a tempest," she wrote (Dec. 25, 1854), "has been brewed in this little pint pot as you could have no idea of. But I, like the Ass, have put on the Lion's skin, and when once I have done that (poor me, who never affronted any one before), I can bray so loud that I shall be heard, I am afraid, as far as England. However, this is no place for lions; and as for asses, we have enough." One proposition made to her was that, as the doctors did not want many more woman nurses, "ten of the Protestants should be appropriated as clerical females by the chaplains, and ten of the nuns by the priests, _not as nurses_, but as female ecclesiastics. With this of course I have nothing to do. It being directly at variance with my instructions, I cannot of course appropriate the Government money to such a purpose." Miss Nightingale's own proposition was to allocate the party in various proportions to various hospitals; but the Superior of the new set of nuns objected that "it would be uncanonical" for any of her party to be separated from her. Then Miss Nightingale proposed sending some of the nuns, either of the first or of the second batch, back to England; but Father Cuffe said that to send them away would be "like the driving of the Blessed Virgin through the desert by Herod." "I believe it may be proved as a logical proposition," wrote Miss Nightingale in the midst of her religious difficulty, "that it is