Miss Nightingale never lost sight of the end in the means. She was doing "God's work" in the "War Office." She thought it was "little" that she did, for it is often the hardest workers who thus deem themselves the most unprofitable servants. And the work was often drudgery; yet through it all she had inspiration from her memories of heroism in the Army, for whose "salvation" she was working. "I have seen to-day [from my window]," she wrote to her mother in 1863, "the first Levée, since all are dead whom I wished to please. A melancholy sight to me. Yet I like the pomp and pageant of the old veterans covered with well-earned crosses. To me who saw them earned, no vain pageant. It is like the Dead March in _Saul_--to me, who heard it on the battle-field, no vain sound, but full of deep and glorious sadness." CHAPTER V HELPERS, VISITORS, AND FRIENDS (1862-1866) To be alone is nothing; but to be without sympathy in a crowd, this is to be confined in solitude. Where there is want of sympathy, of attraction, given and returned, must it not be a feeling of starvation?--FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE: _Suggestions for Thought_ (1860). Friendship should help the friends to work out better the work of life.--BENJAMIN JOWETT (1866). The years of Miss Nightingale's life, described in this Part, were perhaps those of her hardest and most unremitting work. Throughout these years, until August 1866, she lived entirely in London or immediately near to it.[60] Her quarters were in lodgings or in hired houses, until November 1865, when her father took a house for her for a term of years in South Street (No. 35), near her married sister. This house (No. 10 when the street was renumbered) was the one that she occupied till her death. I think that there was not a single day during the period from 1862 to 1866 upon which she was not engaged in one part or another of the manifold work described in preceding chapters. And there was much other work as well, begun in these years, but brought to completion later, which will be described in a subsequent Part. She gave account of her days to Madame Mohl (Jan. 24, 1865), and recalled what "a poor woman with 13 children, who took in washing, once said to me--her idea of heaven was to have one hour a day in which she could do nothing." Yet all that Miss Nightingale did was done forcefully. "I am completely reassured as to the state of your health," wrote her old friend Mr. Reeve (Jan. 21, 1865), in reply to some communication on Indian affairs, "by the Homeric frame of mind you are in. You will live an hundred years. You will write a Sanitariad or a Lawrentiad in 24 books, and Lord Derby will translate you into all known languages. Stanley will be Lord Derby then, but this will only make the thing more appropriate." But her work, though very vigorous, was very hard. It was done, not as