ct was not mistaken, which, when she set out from England on
her mission of mercy, hailed her as a heroine; I trust that she may
not earn her title to a higher, though sadder, appellation. No one
who has observed her fragile figure and delicate health can avoid
misgivings lest these should fail."

Public feeling bubbled up into poetry. Even doggerel ballads sung
about the streets praised

"The Nightingale of the East,
For her heart it means good."

Among many others, Longfellow wrote the charming poem, "The Lady
with the Lamp," so beautifully illustrated by the statuette of
Florence Nightingale at St Thomas's Hospital, suggested by the
well-known incident recorded in a soldier's letter: "She would speak
to one and another, and nod and smile to many more; but she could
not do it to all, you know, for we lay there by hundreds; but we
could kiss her shadow as it fell, and lay our heads on our pillows
again, content."

"Lo! in that house of misery
A lady with a lamp I see
Pass through the glimmering gloom.
And flit from room to room.

"And slow, as in a dream of bliss,
The speechless sufferer turns to kiss
Her shadow as it falls
Upon the darkening walls.

"On England's annals, through the long
Hereafter of her speech and song.
A light its rays shall cast
From portals of the past.

"A lady with a lamp shall stand
In the great history of the land.
A noble type of good
Heroic womanhood."

In the following spring Miss Nightingale crossed the Black Sea and
visited Balaclava, where the state of the hospitals in huts was
extremely distressing, as help of all kinds was even more difficult
to obtain there than at Scutari. Here Miss Nightingale spent some
weeks, until she was prostrated by a severe attack of the Crimean
fever, of which she very nearly died.

But at length the Crimean war came to an end. The nation was
prepared to welcome its heroine with the most passionate enthusiasm.
But Florence Nightingale quietly slipped back unnoticed to her
Derbyshire home, without its being known that she had passed through
London.

Worn out with ill-health and fatigue, and naturally shrinking from
publicity, the public at large has scarcely ever seen her; she has
been a great invalid ever since the war, and for many years hardly
ever left her house.

But her energy has been untiring. She was one of the founders of the
Red Cross Society for the relief