stration of one of his minute acts of kindness is
given in his biography:--"He was one day taking a long country walk near
Freshford, when he met a little girl, about five years old, sobbing over
a broken bowl; she had dropped and broken it in bringing it back from
the field to which she had taken her father's dinner in it, and she said
she would be beaten on her return home for having broken it; when, with
a sudden gleam of hope, she innocently looked up into his face, and
said, 'But yee can mend it, can't ee?'

"My father explained that he could not mend the bowl, but the trouble he
could, by the gift of a sixpence to buy another. However, on opening his
purse it was empty of silver, and he had to make amends by promising to
meet his little friend in the same spot at the same hour next day, and
to bring the sixpence with him, bidding her, meanwhile, tell her mother
she had seen a gentleman who would bring her the money for the bowl next
day. The child, entirely trusting him, went on her way comforted. On
his return home he found an invitation awaiting him to dine in Bath the
following evening, to meet some one whom he specially wished to see. He
hesitated for some little time, trying to calculate the possibility of
giving the meeting to his little friend of the broken bowl and of still
being in time for the dinner-party in Bath; but finding this could
not be, he wrote to decline accepting the invitation on the plea of 'a
pre-engagement,' saying to us, 'I cannot disappoint her, she trusted me
so implicitly.'"]

[Footnote 1411: Miss Florence Nightingale has related the following incident as
having occurred before Sebastopol:--"I remember a sergeant who, on
picket, the rest of the picket killed and himself battered about the
head, stumbled back to camp, and on his way picked up a wounded man
and brought him in on his shoulders to the lines, where he fell down
insensible. When, after many hours, he recovered his senses, I believe
after trepanning, his first words were to ask after his comrade, 'Is he
alive?' 'Comrade, indeed; yes, he's alive--it is the general.' At that
moment the general, though badly wounded, appeared at the bedside. 'Oh,
general, it's you, is it, I brought in? I'm so glad; I didn't know your
honour. But, ----, if I'd known it was you, I'd have saved you all the
same.' This is the true soldier's spirit."

In the same letter, Miss Nightingale says: "England, from her grand
mercantile and commercial suc