o the government. A
few days later the world read, with moistened eyes, this letter from
the war office: "Miss Nightingale, accompanied by thirty-four nurses,
will leave this evening. Miss Nightingale, who has, I believe, greater
practical experience of hospital administration and treatment than any
other lady in this country, has, with a self-devotion for which I have
no words to express my gratitude, undertaken this noble but arduous
work."

The heart of the English nation followed the heroic woman. Mrs.
Jameson wrote: "It is an undertaking wholly new to our English
customs, much at variance with the usual education given to women in
this country. If it succeeds, it will be the true, the lasting glory
of Florence Nightingale and her band of devoted assistants, that they
have broken down a Chinese wall of prejudices,--religious, social,
professional,--and have established a precedent which will, indeed,
multiply the good to all time." She did succeed, and the results can
scarcely be overestimated.

As the band of nurses passed through France, hotel-keepers would take
no pay for their accommodation; poor fisherwomen at Boulogne struggled
for the honor of carrying their baggage to the railway station. They
sailed in the _Vectis_ across the Mediterranean, reaching Scutari,
Nov. 5, the day of the battle of Inkerman.

They found in the great Barrack Hospital, which had been lent to the
British by the Turkish government, and in another large hospital near
by, about four thousand men. The corridors were filled with two rows
of mattresses, so close that two persons could scarcely walk between
them. There was work to be done at once.

One of the nurses wrote home, "The whole of yesterday one could only
forget one's own existence, for it was spent, first in sewing the
men's mattresses together, and then in washing them, and assisting the
surgeons, when we could, in dressing their ghastly wounds after their
five days' confinement on board ship, during which space their wounds
had not been dressed. Hundreds of men with fever, dysentery, and
cholera (the wounded were the smaller portion) filled the wards in
succession from the overcrowded transports."

Miss Nightingale, calm and unobtrusive, went quietly among the men,
always with a smile of sympathy for the suffering. The soldiers often
wept, as for the first time in months, even years, a woman's hand
adjusted their pillows, and a woman's voice soothed their sorrows.

Miss