lory of her own.

She returned to England quietly as she had left, although a British
Government placed a battleship at her service--and she lived in England
engaged in useful and philanthropic work for a great many years. With a
fund of about $250,000 she founded the Nightingale Home for the proper
training of nurses, a fund that she could have doubled or trebled had
she so desired, or if the needs of the home had required it. In the
following years she was frequently consulted on hospital organization
in the armies not only of Great Britain but of Continental nations as
well. She died in 1910, one of the great figures among the heroines of
history.

CHAPTER XXVI

FATHER DAMIEN

Many are the stories of brave doctors and ministers who have sacrificed
themselves in times of pestilence and plague, caring for the sick,
allowing experiments to be performed on their own bodies, and giving
their lives without fear in the hope of saving invalids and sufferers;
but no story is more thrilling than that of the Belgian priest named
Father Damien.

Father Damien's real name was Joseph de Veuster, and he was born in the
year 1840, in the little village of Tremeloo in Belgium, not far from
the city of Louvain that became famous in the World War when the
Germans sacked it, burned its university and murdered its inhabitants.

A strong religious impulse ruled the de Veuster family, and out of
three children two were destined for a religious life. As a matter of
fact all three finally entered the service of the Church--a girl named
Pauline who entered a convent and two brothers, Auguste and Joseph, who
became respectively Father Pamphile and Father Damien.

Originally the parents of these three children had decided that Auguste
was to become a priest and Joseph was to enter business and be a
merchant, but it could easily be seen the priesthood was also the life
for Joseph, who had a serious and contemplative nature even when very
young, and spent much of his time in prayer and meditation. On one
occasion, when only four years old, Joseph had been found on his knees
before the altar of the church when it was supposed that he had
wandered away from home and been lost in the woods or the fields about
the town, and when still a young boy he was fond of taking long walks
by himself in the fields and of herding sheep until he became known as
"the little shepherd."

When Joseph was eighteen his sister Pauline left home to ente