Virgin Saints and MartyrsBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Religion
Virgin Saints and Martyrs
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Christian women saints; Martyrs
“About six months afterwards I happened to be at a railway station, and
saw a pointsman who had been in our hospital with an injured foot, but
who, as his friends wished to have him at home, had left before his foot
was cured. I inquired how his foot was. He replied that had it not been
for Sister Dora he would have lost his foot, if not his life. I said,
‘How did she save your foot when you were not in the hospital, and she
was ill at the time you left the hospital?’ ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘you
know my foot was far from well when I left the hospital; there was no
one at our house who could see to it properly, and it took bad ways, and
one evening I was in awful pain. Oh, how I did wish for Sister Dora to
come and dress it! I felt sure she could give me relief, but I had been
told she was very ill, so I had no hope that my earnest desire would be
realised; but while I was thinking and wishing, the bedroom door was
gently opened, and a figure just like Sister Dora glided so softly into
the room that I could not hear her, but oh! she was so pale that I began
to think it must be her spirit; but when she folded the bedclothes from
off my foot, I knew it was she. She dressed my foot, and from that hour
it began to improve.’
“A few days after this interview with the pointsman I was talking to
Sister Dora and said, ‘By the bye, Sister, I have found out where you
went with the cab that day.’ She replied with a merry twinkle in her
eye, ‘What a long time you have been finding it out!’”
Her old patients ever remembered her with gratitude. A man called Chell,
an engine-stoker, was twice in the hospital under her care, first with a
dislocated ankle, severely cut; the second time, with a leg crushed to
pieces in a railway accident. It was amputated. According to his own
account he remembered nothing of the operation, except that Sister Dora
was there, and that, “When I come to after the chloroform, she was on
her knees by my side with her arm supporting my head, and she was
repeating:—
“‘They climbed the steep ascent of heaven,
Through peril, toil, and pain:
O God, to us may grace be given
To follow in their train.’
And all through the pain and trouble that I had afterwards, I never
forgot Sister’s voice saying those words.” When she was in the small-pox
hospital, avoided by most, this man never failed to stump away to it to
see her and inquire how she was getting on.
There were, as she herself recognised, faults in the character of Sister
Dora; and yet, without these faults, problematical as it may seem, it is
doubtful whether she could have achieved all she did.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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