Page:Una and the Lion by Florence Nightingale.djvu/17

 very year that she was taken from us, she had intended to have "two months' more training" at St. Thomas' Hospital, as soon as she could safely take "a holiday"—what a holiday!—after three weeks with her dear mother and sister. She said she should learn "so much" now, having won her experience, if she had "a little more training."

Dear fellow countrywomen, if any of you are unwilling to leave a loved and happy home, if any of you are unwilling to give up a beloved daughter or sister, know that this servant of God had a home as fair and happy as any, which she loved beyond all created things, and that her mother and sister gave her up to do God's work. Upon the awful character of that sacrifice I cannot speak. They "gave her" (and it) "to God."

I will return to her work at the work-house. How did she do it all? She did it simply by the manifestation of the life which was in her—the trained, well-ordered life of doing her Father's business—so different from the governing, the ordering about, the driving principle. And everybody recognized it—the paupers, and the vestry, and the nurses, and the Poor-Law Board. As for the nurses (those who understood her), her influence with them was unbounded. They would have died for her. Because they always felt that she cared for them, not merely as