Miss Nightingale had no time to waste. Her '' Hospital Notes " may be read to-day with the keenest interest by all who care to know more of that great story of the Crimean War; her " Notes on Nursing " became the handbook of the Nursing Reform, and ought to be in the hands of every nurse to-day as it was in i860, when it was written. Nor in the hands of nurses only; I wish every girl and every boy who reads this story would try to find that slender, dingy volume in some library, and " read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest " its contents. They would know a good deal more than they do now. Well might Miss Nightingale write, in 1861: " I have passed the last four years between four walls, only varied to other four walls once a year; and I believe there is no prospect but of my health becoming ever worse and worse till the hour of my release. But I have never ceased, during one waking hour since my return to England five years ago, laboring for the welfare of the army at home, as I did abroad, and no hour have I given to friendship or amusement during that time, but all to work."
Drop a stone in the water and see how the circles spread, growing wider and wider. After a while
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you cannot see them, but you know that the motion you have started must go on and on till it whispers against the pebbles on the farther shore. So it is with a good deed or an evil one; we see its beginning; we cannot see what distant shore it may reach. So, no one will ever know the full amount of good that this noble woman has done. The Sanitary Commission of our own Civil War, the Red Cross which to-day counts its w^orkers by thousands in every part of the civilized world, both owed their first impulse to the pebble dropped by Florence Nightingale — even her own life, given freely to suffering humanity.
I have never seen, but I like to think of the quiet room in London, where she lies to-day in the white beauty of her age. Nearly ninety years have passed since the little girl-baby woke to life among the blossoms of the City of Flowers; more than half a century has gone by since the Lady with the Lamp passed like light along the corridors of the Barrack Hospital; yet still Florence Nightingale lives and loves, still her thoughts go out in tenderness and compassion toward all who are " in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness, or any other adversity."