Page:A short history of social life in England.djvu/234

214 were her enemies, she bound up and dressed their wounds. These were not days famous for mercy, pity, and forgiveness, and she was remonstrated with. "I have done nothing but what I think is my duty," she affirmed, "in humanity to them as fellow-creatures, not as enemies."

So, too, Anne Murray worked, evidently with some knowledge of nursing and strong nerves. "I believe threescore was the least that was dressed by me and my women and a man who I employed to such as was unfit for me to dress; and besides the plasters or balsam I applied I gave every one of them as much as might dress them three or four times, for I had provided myself with things necessary for that employment, expecting they might be useful." Many of the wounds had been left too long, but when others shrank from dressing them, this brave woman struggled on. "None was able to stay in the room, but all left me," she says of one bad case. "Accidentally a gentleman came in, who seeing me cutting off the man's sleeve of his doublet, which was hardly fit to be touched, he was so charitable as to take a knife and cut it off and fling it in the fire."

Instances such as these might be multiplied,