pleased to give her information. Those who had inside experience knew how much she had done for India, and took it as a compliment that she should notice their work and ask them for advice. "Accept my most grateful thanks," wrote General Baker, on retiring from the India Office Council (Oct. 11, 1875), "not only for your very kind letter[164] and important pamphlet, but also for one of the most complete and agreeable surprises that I have ever met with. It never occurred to me for a moment that my humble efforts for the sanitation of India were so indulgently watched by the High Priestess of the Science." Colonel Yule, the member of Council who succeeded Sir Bartle Frere in the charge of sanitary affairs, and Mr. W. T. Thornton, the Secretary for Public Works, were in frequent correspondence with her. On the special subject of irrigation, she was "coached," not only by a leading authority presently to be mentioned, but by General Rundall (ex-Inspectorgeneral of Indian irrigation), Colonel J. G. Fife, Colonel F. T. Haig, and many other experts. When she turned to Indian education, Mr. A. W. Croft, the Director of Public Instruction, corresponded freely with her. Of her private studies, there is evidence in a great accumulation of Indian Blue-books, Proceedings, Minutes, pamphlets, and other papers, of which many are annotated, abstracted, collated. She had, too, a network of correspondents in India. There were in various parts of the country Sanitary Commissioners, doctors, engineers, Irrigation officers, who wrote to her constantly, and sometimes more freely than in official reports. There were occasions--as in a dispute, once hot, now as dead as the unhappy subjects of it[165]--when her friends in the India Office had to admit that her information was earlier and better than theirs. So, then, if her friends asked why she meddled in affairs of which she could not really know anything, she only set the harder to work in mastering the voluminous information at her disposal. [164] Miss Nightingale's letter is given at p. 51 of Colonel Yule's _Memoir of General Sir William Erskine Baker_ (privately printed 1882). [165] There is a reference to this subject--of Famine mortality--in a letter from Mr. Gladstone quoted below, p. 292.