The lot of a school-girl is not too happy at the best among new companions. When their language and ways are those of a foreign country they can become a source of torture to a sensitive child. Some of these school-girl irritations Edith Cavell had to bear; yet such early annoyances evidently left little mark on her, for she returned many years later to Brussels of her own free will, and conquered the affections of the Belgians a second time. Edith Cavell’s early womanhood was spent in London--at the London Hospital, the St. Pancras Infirmary, and the Shoreditch Infirmary in Hoxton. Her training was obtained at the London Hospital, the great institution in the Whitechapel Road which is now nursing many wounded soldiers. The women who train in this hospital pass through a hard school. All hospital nurses work hard, but the nurses who come from “The London” think they know more of the strain of their calling than any others. “The London” proposes to raise a memorial to Nurse Cavell. It is their right and hers that this should be done. For “The London” gave her the thorough training which enabled her to become the skilful teacher of others, and to instruct the nurses who should succour with equal care the wounded of all nations. At the end of her arduous training at the London Hospital in 1896, Miss Cavell went to St. Pancras Infirmary as Night Superintendent. She stayed there for a little more than three years. Then she became Assistant Matron at the Shoreditch Infirmary in Hoxton. She left Hoxton in 1906 to start the work in Brussels which ended only with her cruel death. Including the training years at the London Hospital, Edith Cavell had given twenty-two years to nursing the sick. She was twenty-one years old when she began this work. She was forty-three when she met her death. Thus she had given up the best years of a woman’s life without a break, save for the occasional precious holidays, of which we shall say a word presently. The work in London was one of unvarying routine in the most dismal surroundings. Nothing but a real devotion to the task could have made the monotony tolerable. The writer asked one of those who worked with her for part of this time what was the reason that decided Edith Cavell to become a nurse. “She felt it was her vocation,” was the simple answer; “isn’t that enough?” The vocation, in these great London infirmaries, consisted in preserving a cheerful face day in and day out; in ruling, with kindness but also with firmness and an unfaltering tact, old men and women, children from the poorest slums; in being constantly in contact with pain and suffering and in the near presence of death. Those who remember her work in London--and they are very many--speak of her unselfishness and of a shy pride about the details of her labours.