All Nightingale Sisters were her "daughters," alike in Canada or in Scotland, as at St. Thomas's. She advised them, helped them, planned for them, with an extraordinary thoroughness. Was a Sister returning to work in the North after a holiday in London? She would remember how careless girls sometimes are of regular meals, and her Commissionaire would be dispatched to see the Sister off and put a luncheon-basket in the carriage. Miss Nightingale was an old hand at purveying, and amongst her papers are careful lists of what such baskets were to contain. She heard of a member of a certain nursing staff being run down. "What Miss X. wants is to be fed like a baby," she wrote, sending a detailed dietary and adding, "Get the things out of my money." She was constant in seeing that her "daughters" took proper holidays; sometimes helping to defray the expense, more often having them to stay with her in South Street or in the country. She was constant, too, in sending them presents of books--both of a professional kind likely to be of help to them in their work, and such as would encourage a taste for general literature. To those who were in London hospitals or infirmaries, her notes were often accompanied by "fresh country eggs," game, or flowers. She always remembered them when Christmas came round and sent evergreens for the wards. At one or two of the London Infirmaries there is a Matron's Garden, planted with rhododendrons. The plants were sent by Miss Nightingale from Embley. To the nurses serving under her friends she sent presents also. She had a verse of the Hospital Hymn[158] finely illuminated on a large scale and gave it, suitably framed, to various institutions. She was as curious and as helpful in relation to the nursing arrangements in other hospitals as in St. Thomas's itself. Her pupils, wherever they might be, referred to their "dear Mistress" or "dearest friend" in all their trials, difficulties, perplexities, and she never failed them--sending words of encouragement, advice, and good cheer. "Should there be anything in which I can be of the least use, here I am": this was a frequent formula in her messages. In these letters a religious note is seldom absent. Never, I imagine, has there been a series of letters in which a high ideal was more continually and persistently presented. But the letters are not less conspicuous for shrewd practical sense and worldly wisdom--as, for instance, when she advises a candidate for a certain post not to frighten the Hospital Board by starting a suggestion at once "to reform the whole system." Miss Nightingale put a high value, too, upon _esprit de corps_ as an aid to maintaining a high standard of duty. Every pupil of the Nightingale School was taught to think of it as an Alma Mater to which she owed much, even as she had received much; all the Sisters who went out into the world from the School were encouraged to regard themselves as members still of a corporate body, however