have full conversation with him about it. Believe me, with warm regard and respect, sincerely yours, W. E. GLADSTONE. [175] The India Office gave 1,250,000 as the total of deaths in the Famine. Mr. Caird, after investigating the question in India, gave 4,050,000 as his estimate. Miss Nightingale's was 5 to 6 millions. "I begin to think now," wrote Sir Louis Mallet (March 10, 1879) when Mr. Caird's estimate was made, "that your 'Shriek' was a better expression of the truth than any other utterance." Miss Nightingale continued the correspondence, and presently Mr. Gladstone called upon her to talk over Indian affairs, which were now beginning to assume some importance in his general campaign against the policy of Lord Beaconsfield. Mr. Gladstone's visit was in May. On June 26 Lord Lawrence died, and Miss Nightingale was deeply moved:-- (_Miss Nightingale to Mr. Gladstone._) _July_ 6 [1879]. I see you were at Lord Lawrence's funeral yesterday, and you may care to hear the story of his last days from one who has been privileged to know and serve with two such men as Sidney Herbert and John Lawrence--very different, but alike in the "one thing needful"--the serving with all their souls and minds and without a thought of self their high ideal of right. Lord Lawrence's last years were spent in work: he did not read, he studied; though almost blind, he waded with the help of a Private Secretary (who was a lady[176]) thro' piles of blue books--chiefly, but not wholly Indian--bringing the weight of his unrivalled experience to bear upon them. Up to Tuesday night, tho' very ill (he died on Friday), he worked. On the Thursday before, he had spoken in the House of Lords on the Indian Finance question. The disease, tedious and trying, of which he died, was brought on by the London School Board work. He used to come home quite exhausted, saying that he could have done the thing himself in half-an-hour; yet having entered, with a patience very foreign, to his nature, into all the niggling crotchets of everybody on the Board. He gave the impression, I believe, of sternness in public, but the tenderness and the playfulness of his intercourse in private were beyond a woman's tenderness. He was a man of iron; he had gone thro' 40 years of Indian life, in times of danger, toil, and crisis; had been brought seven times to the brink of the grave; and had weathered it all--to die of a School Board at last! He had the blue eye, and the expression in it (before his operation), of a girl of 16, and the massive brow and head of a General of Nations rather than of Armies.... I received a letter from him the day _after_ his death--dictated, but signed by himself, sending me some recent Indian Reports--private