ound
to the cottages with Mr. Fliedner, as long ago she had done with the
vicar of Embley, and we may be sure any sick people whom she visited
were always left clean and comfortable when she said good-bye.

But at Kaiserswerth Miss Nightingale had very little chance of learning
any surgery, so she felt that she could not do better than pass some
time in Paris with the nursing sisterhood of St. Vincent de Paul, which
had been established about two hundred years earlier. Here, too, she
went with the sisters on their rounds, both in the hospitals and in the
homes of the poor, and learnt how best to help the people without
turning them into beggars. Every part of the work interested her, but
the long months of hard labour and food which was often scanty and
always different from what she had hitherto had, began to tell on her.
She fell ill, and in her turn had to be looked after by the sisters,
and no doubt in many ways she learned more of sick nursing when she was
a patient than she did when she was a nurse.

* * * * *

It was quite clear that it would be necessary for her to have a good
rest before she grew strong again, and so she went back to Embley, and
afterwards to Lea, and tried to forget that there was any such thing as
sickness. But it is not easy for people who are known to be able and
willing to have peace anywhere, and soon letters came pouring in to Miss
Nightingale begging for her help in all sorts of ways. As far as she
could she undertook it all, and often performed the most troublesome of
all tasks, that of setting right the mistakes of others. In the end her
health broke down again, but not till she had finished what she had set
herself to do.

* * * * *

It was in March 1854 that war broke out between England, France, and
Turkey on the one side, and Russia on the other. The battle-ground was
to be the little peninsula of the Crimea, and soon the Black Sea was
crowded with ships carrying eager soldiers, many of them young and quite
ignorant of the hardships that lay before them.

At first all seemed going well; the victory of the Alma was won on
September 20, 1854, and that of Balaclava on October 25, the anniversary
of Agincourt. But while the hearts of all men were still throbbing at
the splendid madness of the charge when, owing to a mistaken order, the
Light Brigade rode out to take the Russian guns and were mown down by
hundreds, th