Page:Cyclopedia of illustrations for public speakers, containing facts, incidents, stories, experiences, anecdotes, selections, etc., for illustrative purposes, with cross-references; (IA cyclopediaofillu00scotrich).pdf/424

 The trust that's given guard, and to yourself be just.

—Dana

For live howe'er we may, yet die we must.

—Shakespeare

—Good Housekeeping.

(1786)

As I passed down through India I saw two little rice-fields side by side. One was green and growing; the other was dead and dry. I looked for the cause. The great lake was full of water. There was no lack there. Into the one the living water was flowing, for the channel was open. The other was choked. Brother, is your life green and growing, fruitful and joyful, or barren and dry because the channel is choked?—, "Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions," 1910.

(1787)

LIFE A CYCLE

An old man who was just one hundred and three years of age, recently died in Chester, England. Not long before his death he tried to get out of bed, and they said to him: "Father, where do you want to go? What do you want to do?" He answered, "Father is calling me to breakfast." He repeated it two or three times—"Father is calling me to breakfast." The old man had become a child again. He was in his little trundle-bed again hearing his father's voice up the stairway calling him to come to breakfast.

So when we have traveled around the circle of life, we get into the childhood of our old age, and hear the voices of the friends of our youth, which is one of the evidences of the belief that we shall hear those voices again. We would not thus recall them nor remember them if we were not to hear them again.

(1788)

LIFE, A DEVOTED

Florence Nightingale, heroine of the Crimean War Nursing Service, as a child at Lea Hurst, was accustomed to minister to the sick poor, and it so happened that the clergyman of the parish was a man of considerable medical skill. Curiously enough, it was an animal that first turned her thoughts to nursing—the dog of her father's shepherd. Poor Cap's leg was thought to have been broken and he was about to be destroyed, when the girl, under the clergyman's direction, prepared a simple hot compress and soon had the delight of seeing her patient convalescent. The fame of this exploit spread abroad, and many an animal was brought to her to be healed; perhaps that was why she always advocated that sick people should have dumb pets about them if possible. As she grew older, the little girl who had instinctively bandaged her broken dolls in the most professional manner was allowed to attend to the wounds and ailments of real people, and this at a time when ambulance classes were unheard of, and when the only sick nurses available were ignorant and untrained women. Miss Florence did not find the ordinary life of a girl in society appealed to her. With characteristic decision she gave it up and spent the next few years in visiting hospitals in England, Ireland and Scotland. It is easy to see now that the great want of those days was trained women nurses, but it required exceptional intelligence—indeed, we might almost say, a touch of genius, to see it then in the late forties. The question was how to supply the need; characteristically again, Miss Nightingale began with herself. In 1851 she entered the Society of Sisters of Mercy, a Protestant institution at Kaiserverth on the Rhine, for training deaconesses or nursing sisters. Here she thoroughly qualified herself as a nurse, and on her return to London she devoted much time and money to the Governesses' Sanatorium in Harley Street.

The autumn of 1854 saw the beginning of the enterprise for which all this time she had been unconsciously preparing herself. The country was being horrified by the tidings which continually came home of the appalling mismanagement of the military hospitals in the Crimea. Our gallant soldiers were dying by hundreds for lack of the simplest and most elementary nursing. It seemed, as religious people say, a clear "call" to this country squire's daughter, and that very evening she wrote to Mr. Sidney Herbert (afterward Lord Herbert of Lea), the Secretary at War, and sketched her plan. At the very same time Mr. Herbert himself was writing to her to ask if she would organize and take out a company of nurses and the two letters crossed in the post. In October, 1854, Miss Nightingale started for the East with thirty-eight nurses in her command, some of whom were naturally nuns. The day after her arrival came the wounded from Balaklava, quickly followed by six hundred wounded from Inkerman and