excellent way, and there is "the Nightingale touch" in many of her later reports. "To-day they were a little cross, but I got my way all the same." She is "much amused at the manner in which she now gets all she asks for." She suggests things. She is laughed at. She persists. A decent interval is allowed to elapse; and then the things are suggested to her by the officials; she says the suggestions are excellent, and the things are done. It is obvious to Miss Nightingale and Dr. Sutherland that sooner or later the powers of the Lady Superintendent must be better defined; obvious, too, that the worthless probationers and drunken pauper "nurses" must be cleared out; but that is just one of the things that the experiment is meant to prove, and meanwhile it is enough to drive in the thin end of the wedge. So well does Miss Jones do her work that opinion, in the workhouse and outside, begins even to be impatient for the thicker end. The experiment has so far been limited to the male wards. The doctors go to Miss Jones and ask eagerly when she and more Nightingale nurses are to be given charge of the female wards also. Old women who go in to see their husbands or brothers report wonderful changes in the House since "the London nurses" came. Visiting ladies report to the same effect. The experiment is becoming popular; and the Liverpool Vestry begins to wonder whether the cost hitherto borne by Mr. Rathbone's private purse should not be thrown upon the rates. Miss Nightingale has good cause to be pleased. She has been throwing herself into the work, not only in order to make the particular experiment a success, but also because she wants to use it as a lever for promoting larger reforms. [80] See Book I. chap. iii. stanzas 4 _seq._ of _The Faerie Queene_:-- "Her angel's face As the great eye of heaven shyned bright, And made a sunshine in the shady place, etc." III Liverpool had shown the way, and Miss Nightingale resolved in her own mind that the way should be followed in London. The struggle was long and arduous; the fortune of political war went at a critical moment against her; the victory of 1867 was only partial, and indeed there are other parts of her designs which even to this day await fruition. But the insight with which from the very first, as her Papers show, she seized the essential positions was masterly. I can understand how it was that Mr. Charles Villiers, not usually given to such outbursts of admiration, exclaimed to a friend: "I delight to read the Nightingale's song about it all. If any of them had the tenth part of her vigour of mind we might expect something."