FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE, the heroism of pure benevolence Florence Nightin- gale gave-herself. She took the active and entire superintendence of the Sanatorium, devoting herself with indefatigable energy to place it on a firm basis. Derbyshire and Hampshire were exchanged for the narrow dreary establishment ih Harley Street, to which she devoted all her time and fortune. " While her friends missed her at assemblies, lectures, concerts, exhibitions, and all the entertainments for taste and intellect with which London in its season abounds," says one writer, " she, whose powers could have best appreciated them, was sitting beside the bed, and soothing the last complaints of some poor, dying, homeless, queru- lous governess. The homelessness might, not im- probably, result from that very querulousness ; but this is too frequently fomented if not created by the hard, unreflecting folly which regards fellow creatures entrusted with forming the minds and dispositions of its children as ingenious, disagreeable machines, needing, like the steam-engine, sustenance and covering, but, like it, quite beyond or beneath all sympathy, passions, or affections. Miss Nightingale thought otherwise, and found pleasure in tending those poor destitute governesses, in their infirmities, their deaths, or their recoveries. She was seldom seen outside the walls of the institution, and the few friends whom she admitted found her in the midst of nurses, letters, prescriptions, accounts, and interrup- tions. Her health sank under the heavy pressure, 12
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