FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE, and here the clothing supplied by Miss Nightingale was washed and dried. In ten days after her arrival an impromptu kitchen was fitted up, from which eight hundred men were daily supplied with well- cooked food and other necessary culinary comforts in abundance - beef-tea, chicken-broth, rice pudding, jelly, chickens, and numerous delicacies. Hereto- fore the cookery, performed by soldiers, without any superintendence, and of course without any system, had been most detestable, when the sickly, fastidious appetite of a fevered or consumptive patient is con- sidered. Meat and vegetables had been boiled in one large copper, the separate portions enclosed in nets, and served up either done to rags or half raw ; and the delivery had been as devoid of system as the cookery. Sometimes it would be six or seven o'clock in the evening before, in individual cases, things ordered could be supplied, and then the means of cooking would be at an end. In subordinate, as well as in leading points of arrangement, the same feminine directing hand was now to be traced. With rare thoughtfulness, the nurses were em- ployed in making up needful articles of bedding or surgical requisites, stump pillows for amputation cases, and other things of a like nature. One "rule of the service" was in existence which alone exemplifies the system bearing so heavily upon the helpless invalids, and which it required all the tact and firmness of Miss Nightingale to stand against ; it demanded that all articles needed even 24
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