Page:Portraits of celebrated women Florence Nightingale.djvu/19

Rh England, the continued deficiency of the purveying, and the increasing emergencies of the hospital service, enabled Miss Nightingale to extend the sphere of her usefulness; and thus, together with her own admirably patient perseverance, she succeeded in having her nurses employed in their proper posts, and her own system established in perfect working order. The results are briefly summed up. After she had introduced her system there and brought it into successful operation under her powerful will and genial presence, the mortality diminished, and during the last six mouths the mortality among the sick was not much more than among the healthy Guards at home, and during the last five months two-thirds only of what it was at home. In one sentence the world may read her devotion to her mission of army, medical, and sanitary reform: "I was never out of the hospitals," she says, "never out of the hospitals night or day."

The Hon. and Rev. Sydney Godolphin Osborne, in his deeply-interesting work upon Scutari and its hospitals, gives a description of Miss Nightingale, as she appeared exercising her vocation among the sick and dying. He says: "In appearance, she is just what you would expect in any other well-bred woman, who may have seen, perhaps, rather more than thirty years of life; her manner and countenance are prepossessing, and this without the possession of positive beauty; it is a face not easily forgotten, pleasing in its smile, with an eye betokening great self-possession, and giving, when she wishes, a quiet look of firm determination to every feature. Her general demeanor is quiet, and rather reserved; still, I am much mistaken if she is not gifted with a very lively sense of the ridiculous. In conversation, she speaks on matters of business with a grave earnestness one would not expect from her appearance. She has evidently a mind disciplined to restrain, under the principles of the action of the moment, every feeling which would interfere with it. She has trained herself to command, and learned the value of conciliation toward others, and constraint over herself. I