giving directions to others about carrying on her work, but generally asleep, day and night. It was long before she could stand; and when she could she was sent away to recruit. Good nursing and comforts soon restored her; and she went to the village as soon as she was allowed. A joyful cry ran from house to house of those which were still inhabited; and the people crowded round the chaise, throwing in little presents which they had prepared for the chance of the Good Lady returning.
Alone she did it!—the nursing of a fever-stricken population, who were prostrated as by the plague. She did it simply because she was wanted. The people—all entire strangers to her, the aunt and all—were sick and dying; and she could not leave them. It never seemed to herself a remarkable act. The fever scene was remarkable; and of this she spoke with earnestness on occasion: but her own share in it was, in her view, a fine piece of experience; so that, if the fever was to happen, she was glad to have been there. She went back to America, married, and brought up her family of children in the simplest way, being only remarkable for her nursing skill, and the number of sick babies she had tended, and the children who had died in her arms, while she had a houseful of her own to attend to. She died of a lingering and painful disorder, some years after her husband. Her cheerfulness never failed; and in making arrangements for her orphan children, she spoke of her approaching departure just as she would of a voyage to Europe by the next steamer. If ever there was a perfect example of a spontaneous, unprofessional nurse, it was she.
Florence Nightingale, however, will be, through all time to come, the Representative Nurse par excellence! In her case it is a special calling, in virtue of natural capacity, moral and intellectual at once. She did not set out from any chosen starting-point. She did not propose to earn her own salvation by a life of good works. She was not incited by visions of a religious life in a favoured monastic community. She did not aspire to take in hand a department of human misery, in order to extinguish it, and then look about to see what particular misery it should be. She does not appear to have had any plans relating to herself at all. Nor was she overtaken by the plague in a village: nor did she overtake a fever in a village in the course of her travels, like her representative sisters of an earlier time: nor did she do the work of the occasion, and re-enter ordinary life as if nothing had happened. Her case is special and singular in every way.
Her childhood and youth were very much like those of little girls who have wealthy parents, and carefully chosen governesses, and good masters, and much travel—in short, all facilities for intellectual cultivation by study and extended intercourse with society, at home and abroad.
The peculiarity in the case of herself and her nearest relatives seems to be their having been reared in an atmosphere of sincerity and freedom—of reality, in fact,—which is more difficult to obtain than might be thought. There was a certain force and sincerity of character in the elder members on both sides of the house which could not but affect the formation of the children’s characters; and in this case there was a governess also whose lofty rectitude and immaculate truthfulness commanded the reverence of all who knew her.
In childhood a domestic incident disclosed to the honest-minded little girl what her liking was, and she followed the lead of her natural taste. She took care of all cuts and bruises, and nursed all illness within her reach; and there is always a good deal of these things within the reach of country gentry who are wealthy and benevolent. For the usual term of young-lady life, Florence Nightingale did as other young ladies. She saw Italy, and looked at its monuments; she once went to Egypt and Greece with the Bracebridges: she visited in society, and went to Court. But her heart was not in the apparent objects of her life—not in travel for amusement, nor in art. In literature, books which disclosed life and its miseries, and character with its sufferings, burnt themselves in upon her mind, and created much of her future effort. She was never resorted to for sentiment. Sentimentalists never had a chance with her. Besides that her character was too strong, and its quality too real for any sympathy with shallowness and egotism, she had two characteristics which might well daunt the sentimentalists—her reserve, and her capacity for ridicule. Ill would they have fared who had come to her for responsive sympathies about sentiment, or even real woes in which no practical help was proposed; and there is perhaps nothing uttered by her, from her evidence before the Sanitary Commission for the Army to her recently published “Notes on Nursing,” which does not disclose powers of irony which self-regardant persons may well dread.
Such force and earnestness must find or make a career. She evidently believes, as all persons of genius do, that she found it, while others say she made it. Philosophy will hereafter reconcile the two in her case and many others. As a matter of fact, while other young ladies were busy, and perhaps better employed than usual in enjoying the Great Exhibition, she was in the Kaiserswerth Institution, on the Rhine, going through the training for nursing, and investigating the methods of organisation there and elsewhere.
The strongest sensation she perhaps ever excited among her personal acquaintance was when she undertook to set up the Sanitarium in Harley Street, and left home to superintend the establishment. Her first work there was chiefly financial and the powers of administration she manifested were a complete justification of what she had done in leaving her father’s house to become what people called the matron of a charity. At first, common-minded people held up hands and eyes as if she had done something almost scandalous. Between that day and this, they must have discovered that she could exalt any function, and that no function could lower her. She rectified the accounts, paid the debts, and brought all round; and she always had leisure to help and comfort the sick ladies in the house. At one time, I remember, there was not a case in the