WERE THE DISAPPOINTMENTS, the reverses she endured, the common lot of the reformer? She refused to admit it. She was convinced that she was singled out by a malignant fate. She herself, her work, everything she touched, was cursed. She beat herself against the callousness and indifference of the world; she exhausted herself in storms of resentment and despair. Such was the power of her extraordinary nature that in middle age the intensity of her emotion was unabated, and she continued to feel as violently, as blindly, as if she were a girl.

It was the old story, repeated now for more than twenty years. She must attain perfection, or she had failed. She must have everything, or she declared she had nothing. She refused to consider what had been done, only what had not.

Yet how much she had achieved was becoming plainer every day. Lord Stanley's coolness was notorious, but on July 25, 1864, he wrote to her: "Every day convinces me more of two things; first, the vast influence on the public mind of the Sanitary Commissions of the last few years . . . and next, that all this has been due to you and to you almost alone." Jowett wrote on September 8, 1865: "Considering what Ministers are, instead of wondering at their not doing all you want, I wonder at their listening to a word you say. A poor sick lady, sitting in a room by herself and they have only not to go near her and not to read her letters and there is an end of her. And yet you seem to draw them."

She would not be comforted. More than health had been lost in these last years of incessant toil. Sometimes now she doubted. She had been able to be ruthless because she had been sustained by an unshakable conviction that what she did was right. Now she was not sure. A new note crept into her letters. Writing to Clarkey in May, 1865, she said she felt like a vampire who had sucked Sidney Herbert's and Clough's blood. Writing to Jowett in July, she was humble and confused. "You are quite right in what you say of me. . . . I will try and take your advice. I have tried but it is too late. I lost my serenity some years ago, then I lost clearness of perception, so that sometimes I did not know whether I was doing right or wrong for two minutes together---the horrible loneliness---but I don't mean to waste your time."

Once she had felt proud to be alone; now she dreaded the prospect of perpetual solitude. Her life was closing in. Every hour must be given up to work. Friends, affection, sympathy, all must be sacrificed. In the summer of 1865 Clarkey came over to London. She was Miss Nightingale's most intimate friend, and since Sidney Herbert's death they had drawn still closer. "What I lost in Sidney Herbert you only (who lost M. Fauriel) can tell," she wrote to her in 1862. Yet she could not spare time to see Clarkey. "Clarkey Mohl darling," she wrote on June 23, 1865, "how I should like to be able to see you, but it is quite impossible. I am sure no one ever gave up so much to live who longed so much to die as I do. It is the only credit I claim. I will live if I can, I shall be so glad if I can't."

The distinguished visitors who had called at the Burlington were no longer received. The Queen of Holland wished to call---"I really feel it a great honour," wrote Miss Nightingale in June, 1865, "she is a Queen of Queens. But it is quite quite impossible." She would see no one who was not directly connected with her work. She made, however, one exception. In 1864 Garibaldi came to London; she had never forgotten her girlhood's passion for Italian freedom, and she had regularly sent money to his funds. Now she consented to receive him. On April 27 he came, using Sir Harry Verney's carriage to avoid notice. She was disillusioned. "Alas, alas, what a pity that utter impracticability," she wrote to Harriet Martineau on April 28. He was noble and heroic, but he was vague. He had, she wrote, no "administrative capacity." He "raved" for a Government like the English, but "he knows no more what it is than his King Bomba did." "One year of such a life as I have led for ten years," she told Harriet Martineau, "would tell him more of how one has to give and take with a 'representative Government' than all his 'Utopias' and his 'Ideal.'"

Her consolation in her solitude was friendship with Jowett. By 1864 her intimacy with him was closer than her intimacy with any other human being, with the exception of Clarkey. They did not meet frequently, though he occasionally spent an afternoon with her when he was in London, but they exchanged many hundreds of letters. Nearly all Miss Nightingale's personal letters to Jowett, with the exception of a few rough drafts preserved among her papers, have been destroyed, but she kept most of his letters to her. Intense concern for her welfare, intense affection breathe from every line. He was devoted to her, and because he was devoted to her she would accept advice and even criticism from him. Jowett alone could tell her not to exaggerate, "as you always do"; Jowett alone could tell her to be calmer, "and don't try and move the world by main force"; Jowett alone could tell her not to despise people and, worse still, to let them see that she despised them; Jowett alone could scold her, and she would accept and almost enjoy the scolding. He had entered her life when she was crushed by the death of Sidney Herbert, and his remarkable powers of sympathy and understanding were offered her at a time when she was desperately in need of them. "Mine has been such horrible loneliness," she wrote to him on July 12, 1865. "But how many women, maids of all work and poor governesses, have been lonelier than I---and have done much better than I. I think if I had had one friend---such a friend as you have been to me for the past six months. . . ."

Friendship with Jowett took the only form in which friendship could have been fitted into her life. There was infinite solicitude, but there were no demands; there was constant and intimate communication, but the communication was by letter and brought no interruption to the routine of work. The friendship was eminently successful, as her friendship with Clarkey was eminently successful. Jowett was in Oxford; Clarkey was in Paris; she was in London. The problem of interference did not arise.

But even though Miss Nightingale had resigned herself to a "desert-island" life she still had to find a place to live. For some time Fanny had been trying to persuade W. E. N. that the only solution was to buy a house, but he was unwilling. Fanny was extravagant; Embley and Lea Hurst were expensive to keep up; he was irritated to find himself continually short of money. Yet Florence's accommodation cost more every year---the possibility that she could live on an annual income of £500 was never mentioned now. At last W. E. N. was forced to the conclusion that a permanent house might be an economy. On July 4 he wrote to Fanny: "Saturday she goes to Ld Digby's big house at Hampstead £11 a week. 34 South Street, £500 the year, Hampstead if she stays there three months £120. Parthe urges me to offer £ 7000 for 35 South Street, you are in the same vein. There is nothing for it but to say I will give £5000, you adding your money. Of course I shall consider the money sunk from the time I produce it and shall hope NEVER TO HEAR ANY MORE OF IT. Is it not of course too that the £7000 will not be accepted?"

The £7000 was accepted, and at the end of October, "with everyone's united efforts," wrote Fanny, Miss Nightingale was moved into No. 35 South Street, which henceforward became her home. The house suited her admirably; it was central, manageable, and backed on to the gardens of Dorchester House. She was able to enjoy fresh air, sunlight, and trees, and to observe birds, of which she was passionately fond.

A few years later the street was renumbered: No. 35 became No. 10, and at No. 10 South Street she continued to live until her death.

No further attempt was made to provide her with a companion. She moved into her new house to live alone. And, as she moved in, the specter of desolate solitude, which had crept into her life as one by one her friends were taken from her, stalked nearer. The sword which seemed to hang over all those she loved fell again, and she sustained another great grief.

Of the friends of her youth she had loved none more than Hilary Bonham Carter. Soft, loving, a pleasure to look at and highly gifted, Hilary possessed a remarkable power of inspiring affection. "I was so attached to her," wrote M. Mohl on September 9, 1865. "I have never known anyone so made up of kindness." But Florence disapproved of Hilary, and in 1862 she had sent her away. Clarkey implored her to take Hilary back. "My dearest," she wrote on February 5, 1862, "if she is as useful to you as a limb, why should you amputate her? . . . the thing she likes best in the world is being with you and being useful to you . . . I agree with you, she ought to do for herself, but I am not sure her nature can bear it. I give it to you as a problem, think on it."

To make Hilary happy by giving way to her was criminal to Miss Nightingale. Clarkey could write, "I can't alter Hilly, I can only give her a little enjoyment"; but Miss Nightingale despised such enjoyment. She refused to have her back, and Hilary continued to be maid-of-all-work to her family. "Hilly is devoured by little black relations just like Fleas," Clarkey wrote on August 19.

The break with Miss Nightingale was complete. "I see nothing of Hilary," Miss Nightingale wrote to Clarkey on February 14, 1863. "I believe the fact is she cannot see me without an appointment and to her everything is possible but keeping an appointment" In April, 1865 Hilary broke down, was examined by a specialist, and said to have a tumor. In fact she was dying of cancer. On May 16, 1865, Jowett wrote to Miss Nightingale: "She seemed to be at peace, but she had suffered greatly---poor thin--g-she said that she had mental trial in past times and that, she found, had been alleviated by trusting in God, but she did not find that physical suffering could be similarly alleviated." On September 6 she died. "Hilary was released this morning at half past eight . . . " Miss Nightingale told Clarkey, "Oh dearest how she had suffered!"

Throughout the summer, while she was in London, solitary and overworked, Hilary's terrible illness had been preying on Miss Nightingale's mind. On Hilary's death she broke into frenzy. Rage seized her, made up of resentment, anger, and despair---despair at Hilary's wasted talents, at Hilary's wasted life, at the stupidity and indifference of Hilary's family, at the system of family life which permitted such things to be. On September 8 she wrote Clarkey an immense, furious letter: ". . . There is not a single person, except yourself, who does not think that Hilary's family were quite right in this most monstrous of slow murders---and all for what? There is something grand and touching in the Iphigenia sacrifice and Jephthah's daughter. But, if Jephthah had made his vow to sacrifice his daughter to feed his pigs it would only be very dirty and disgusting. And I say, the Fetichism to which Hilary has been sacrificed is very dirty and disgusting. . . . I shall never cease to think as long as I live of you and M. Mohl as of Hilary's only friends. The golden bowl is broken---and it was the purest gold---and the most unworked gold---I have ever known. I shall never speak of her more, I have done. . . . How I hate well meaning people."

Hilary's death was succeeded by another blow, the death of Lord Palmerston on October 18. Miss Nightingale regretted him deeply. But personal regret was secondary to the serious loss she sustained in no longer having Palmerston to help her in her work. On October 18 she wrote to Dr. Walker, the Secretary of the Bengal Sanitary Commission: "He may be passing away even at this moment. He will be a great loss to us. Tho' he made a joke when asked to do the right thing, he always did it. No one else will be able to carry the things thro' the Cabinet as he did. I shall lose a powerful protector. . . . He was so much more in earnest than he appeared. He did not do himself justice."

Through the winter of 1865, her first winter in her own house, she was miserably ill and miserably unhappy. Death and failure, failure in India, her loss of power at the War Office combined to crush her. "I just keep my place on at the War Office by doing all their dirty work for them, i.e. what they are too cowardly to do for themselves---les lâches," she wrote to Clarkey in March, 1865. She had been bed-ridden for four years, and she began to have severe pains in her back, described as "rheumatism of the spine." She was ordered to have a "rubber," a masseuse, three times a week, but the state of her nerves made treatment difficult. The "rubber" was forbidden to speak. She must come in noiselessly, do her work, and withdraw without speaking to Miss Nightingale on any pretext. The treatment had little effect, and she passed the winter and spring in constant pain. "Nothing did me any good," she wrote to M. Mohl. in July, 1866, "but a curious little new fangled operation of putting opium under the skin which relieves one for twenty-four hours---but does not improve the vivacity or serenity of one's intellect." Yet for the first time for many years her horizons were widening to include something beyond her work. During the long winter nights, lonely, sleepless, and in pain she had once more begun to read and encouraged by Jowett, she turned once more to Greek. She began to resign herself to the fact that the ideal companionship, the ideal sympathy, for which she so passionately longed, were never to be hers, and to make the best of such materials as life offered her.

Her emotions found an outlet in affection for her cats. She worked with a cat "tied in a knot round her neck." As many as six cats wandered at will about her room and made "unseemly blurs" on her papers. On many of her letters and drafts is still to be seen the print of a cat's paw. She amused herself by playing with them and described to Clarkey her efforts to teach one of her kittens to wash itself; and the kitten saying "what an awkward great cat that is."

The winter of 1865 passed. It was two years since the Report of the Indian Sanitary Commission had been issued, and nothing had been accomplished. The work of pushing on without result, of enormous labors which perpetually came to nothing, was infinitely dreary, infinitely exacting; and the strain on her was increased by the irritation of her relations with Dr. Sutherland.

As they worked together year after year, she became more and more dependent on him and found him more intolerably provoking. She admired the ability, but she disliked the man. "I know he is your pet aversion as he is mine," she wrote to Clarkey in 1862. "Don't believe what Sutherland tells me he told you . . . he only does it to annoy me," she wrote to Douglas Galton in 1862, "You know how queer he is." As she grew more exacting, Dr. Sutherland became more elusive. He lived at Finchley, which Miss Nightingale thought sufficiently distant, but in 1865 he moved even further away to Norwood. At Finchley he had been fond of gardening; at Norwood he had a garden of considerable size which absorbed a great deal of his time. "I find---I don't know whether you find---it more and more difficult to rouse Dr. Sutherland to do the work we have to do," she wrote to Douglas Galton in 1866. "He has always some pond to dig in his garden. Confound that Norwood." Through the years of crushing labor on the Indian Sanitary Report she railed at him with increasing bitterness. She complained of his "incredible looseness of thought and recklessness of action." She scolded him for losing papers---"it is as I thought, Sutherland took my copy of the Army Medical Schools Report and now he can't find it." Sometimes he would not work, and she was infuriated. "I could not get Sutherland to do a thing yesterday," she wrote to Douglas Galton in 1866. "He was just like one possessed."

She had always been irritated by his deafness. He was becoming more deaf as he grew older and always found it totally impossible to hear anything if he were scolded. As her health deteriorated, speaking loud enough for Dr. Sutherland to hear exhausted her. From 1864 onward she developed a system of communicating with him by scribbling on any piece of paper which happened to be handy; literally hundreds of such scribbles are preserved, written on odd scraps of paper of all descriptions, from the margins of letters to pieces of blotting-paper. "What have you done?" she wrote. "You said you were going to lay it before your Committee, you had much better lay it before me!" "Well I don't suppose the man will hurt you." "My dear soul! It's rather late for this." "There's fish for you at one." "You know they could only have let you out because you were incurable." "Write that DOWN." "Why did you tell me that tremendous BANGER." "Which means nothing but that you're too lazy to look at it." "You've looked at it? For five minutes on Wednesday." "What has become of the 8 copies of the Indian Report? Where is Barbadoes? Where are the three Registrar General papers." On one occasion Dr. Sutherland tried to be reconciled with her and she wrote, "I won't shake hands until the Abstract is done."

Irritated by him as she was, their intimacy was very close. No other person was part of her daily life as he was part. She saw him, however ill she might be, and he acted as host in her house. Many notes refer to visitors. "These two people have come. Will you see them for me? I have explained who you are." "Was the luncheon good?" "Did he eat?" "Did he walk?" "Then he's a liar, he told me he couldn't move."

In the autumn of 1865 there was a serious quarrel. She was told by Douglas Galton that it was extremely probable that Dr. Sutherland would be invited, as representative of the Barrack and Hospital Commission, to go to Algiers, Malta, and Gibraltar to investigate recent cholera epidemics. She became frantic. "For God's sake," she wrote to Douglas Galton on December 15, 1865, "if you can, prevent Dr. Sutherland going, he is so childish that if he heard of this Gibraltar and Malta business he would instantly declare there was nothing to keep him in England." She had pledged her word to have the Indian reports and abstracts ready before Parliament met after the Christmas vacation---"a thing I should never have done if I thought Dr. Sutherland was to be sent abroad." Dr. Sutherland was offered the appointment, and in spite of all her entreaties he went. She was furious. On January 19, 1866, she wrote to Dr. Farr: "Dr. Sutherland has been sent to Algiers, and I have all his business besides mine to do. If it could be done I should not mind. I had just as soon wear out in two months as in two years, so the work be done. But it can't. It is just like two men going into business with a million each. The one suddenly withdraws. The other may wear himself to the bone but he can't meet the engagements which he made with two." Dr. Sutherland was aware he was in disgrace. "I have been thinking," he wrote to her from Algiers on January 28; "will she be glad to hear from me? Or will she swear?" In spite of Miss Nightingale's anger he continued during 1866 to leave London for weeks at a time and owing to his absence in the Mediterranean Miss Nightingale was without him during an important crisis in Indian affairs. If Dr. Sutherland had been in London, she was convinced the outcome would have been very different.

At the beginning of 1866 the Indian outlook brightened. Delay in carrying out the recommendations of the Commission was due to the fact that the Sanitary Commissions set up in the Presidencies were subordinate to their local Governments. Miss Nightingale had written to Sir John Lawrence urging that the Sanitary Commissions should be transformed into a public health service, standing on its own feet, responsible directly to the Viceroy and the Viceroy's Council, and kept active by a complementing department of experts at the India Office in London. On January 19 he replied that he agreed to the necessity for reconstructing the sanitary organization and had written a dispatch to the Secretary of State for India requesting a scheme. He did not send her a copy of the dispatch as he assumed she would see it. A week earlier Sir Charles Wood, Secretary of State for India, had been succeeded by Lord de Grey and with Lord de Grey at the India Office it seemed that the establishment of an efficient sanitary administration in India was certain. She asked Lord de Grey to send her a copy of the dispatch but he replied that he had received no such dispatch; it would come in by the next mail, no doubt. Several mails came in, but no dispatch appeared. Meanwhile it became evident that the Government was on its last legs. Within the next few months, even within the next few weeks, it would fall, and Lord de Grey would be Secretary of State for India no longer. She became frantic. March went by; April went by. The Government tottered nearer its fall, and still no dispatch appeared. Miss Nightingale scolded, implored, threatened, but without result. As a final resort Lord de Grey made a personal search, and the dispatch was discovered. "At last the Sanitary Minute has been found," he wrote on May 5, "it was attached to some papers connected with the Finance Department and so escaped notice."

She was ill and Dr. Sutherland away, but by May 7 she had managed to submit a draft scheme to Lord de Grey. The Government was now on the verge of disaster and Lord de Grey harassed and distracted by party business. It was not until June 11 that she was able to extract instructions from him to proceed further. He then requested her to complete the scheme and add a survey of the sanitary question. It was a formidable task, but by dint of further desperate efforts she completed it and sent it to Lord de Grey on June 19.

She was twenty-four hours too late. On the previous day the Government had been defeated and had fallen.

The blow was crushing. "I am furious to that degree," she wrote to Douglas Galton on June 2 3, "at having lost Lord de Grey's five months at the India Office that I am fit to blow you all to pieces with an infernal machine of my own invention." In a letter to M. Mohl on July 12 she said she had come to the end of her endurance. She had lost the opportunity of establishing a public health service in India "by twenty four hours!! I am well nigh done for. Life is too hard for me."

The Tories were now in power, and Miss Nightingale was pushed further outside Government matters. On March 20 she wrote to Clarkey: "While Sidney Herbert was alive I made most of the appointments. This is no bray. . . . Now if you can fancy a position where a person can do nothing directly, nothing but by frightening, intriguing, 'soaping' or going on all fours, that position is mine." A letter she wrote to Douglas Galton on June 27, 1866, showed how conscious she was of being outside Government circles: ". . . now do write to an agitated female F. N. about WHO is to come WHERE. Does Gen. Peel come to the War Office? If so, will he annihilate our Civil Sanitary element? Is Sutherland to go all the same to Malta and Gibraltar this autumn? Will Genl Peel imperil the Army Sanitary Committee? I MUST know---ye infernal powers! Is Mr. Lowe to come into the India Office? It is all unmitigated disaster to me. For, as Lord Stanley is to be Foreign Office (the only place where he can be of NO use to us), I shall not have a friend in the world. If I were to say more I should fall to swearing. I am so indignant---ever yours furiously. F. N."

Meanwhile Parliament rose, and everyone of importance left London. Nothing could be done until the autumn, and again Miss Nightingale must resign herself to inactivity. Jowett begged her to visit her parents. She had not been home for nine years. Fanny was seventy-eight, it was feared that her eyesight was failing, and she had recently been in a carriage accident which had left her bruised and suffering from shock. In August, when the Nightingales invariably went north to Lea Hurst, she was not well enough to travel. It was essential that W. E. N. should go to Lea Hurst, and Miss Nightingale agreed to go home to be with her mother.

Fanny in her old age was to be pitied. Parthe had been her companion, but Parthe was now immersed in her own life. She was mistress of the historic mansion of Claydon and of a house in London. Sir Harry Verney, who was in Parliament, took an active part in public affairs, and Parthe had become "very much the fine lady." She was achieving success as a hostess, and she was writing novels, one of which was published in 1865 in the Cornhill.

Elaborate arrangements were made to receive Miss Nightingale. She traveled in an invalid carriage, and at Embley six rooms were given up to her. Her rooms and her way of life were to be sacred. She worked incessantly, saw no one, and never left her room except to visit her mother.

The first reunion with Fanny was affectionate, but even now she would not give way to her mother. Fanny might be seventy-eight and almost blind, but she was not to be indulged. Miss Nightingale still implacably disapproved of the way in which Fanny frittered away her life. On August 21, 1866, immediately after her arrival, she wrote a long letter to Clarkey. She began tenderly enough: "I don't think my dear mother was ever more touching and interesting to me than she is now in her state of dilapidation. She is so much gentler, calmer, more thoughtful. . . ." But as she proceeded, irritation and disapproval crept in, and at the end of the letter she wrote sharply, "I can't think Mama much altered except her memory . . . and her habits which have become worse, till now she is seldom up until 5 or 6 P.M. and then goes out in the carriage."

Miss Nightingale was not an easy visitor. She required a great deal and was critical of the way in which her requirements were met. To argue with her was forbidden. Aunt Mai, writing to Parthe during the summer, repeated a letter from her daughter Beatrice who was acting as Fanny's companion: "In confidence. Beatrice finds her concerns with Flo extremely difficult. Beatrice does her best but it is very difficult to explain anything to Flo because of her health. Her heart . . . may snap at any extra effort or excitement. Her feeling for Beatrice partakes of the displeasure so often felt when something is done which she thinks might be better done."

Only children were allowed to break into Miss Nightingale's solitude. Fanny kept up her custom of having children to stay through the summer months. During August Fanny wrote to Parthe: "I thought our poor F. both excited and exhausted on Sunday, but to-day she has accepted our beautiful baby, who marched into her room, all alone with a flower in each hand, and played upon her bed for 3/4 of an hour."

When she returned to London, affairs in India could hardly have been more discouraging. Sir John Lawrence's dispatch on sanitary organization still lay unanswered at the India Office, and in India what amounted to the abolition of the Sanitary Commissions was being proposed. Their place was to be taken by a single "Sanitary Officer" in each Presidency, who was also to be Inspector of Prisons; the Inspector-General of Prisons was to become "Sanitary Commissioner to the Government of India." It was difficult to see how, after professing to be convinced of the necessity for a public health service on the lines laid down by Miss Nightingale, Sir John Lawrence could have agreed to a scheme which made sanitary administration a sub-department of the prison department. She was bitterly disappointed---very far away were the days when she had sung for joy at Sir John Lawrence's government. Dr. Sutherland frankly said Sir John Lawrence was hopeless. "He is our worst enemy," he wrote in 1866; and he advised her before she attempted to do anything further to wait until Sir John Lawrence's term of office ended in the following year. Douglas Galton urged her to approach Sir Bartle Frere, a well-known Indian administrator, who had just been appointed to a seat on the India Council. Before she had time to write, he had asked permission to call, and on June 16 she wrote to Douglas Galton: "I have seen Sir Bartle Frere. He came on Friday by his own appointment. And we had a great talk. He impressed me wonderfully. I hope Sir B. Frere may be of use to us." The friendship became one of the closest of her life and for the next two months Miss Nightingale and Sir Bartle Frere met almost daily. "I need not tell you how entirely my services are at your disposal," he wrote after their first interview.

Sir Bartle Frere, like John Lawrence, possessed deep sympathy with the Indian character. His outstanding achievement was his administration of the province of Scinde. In eight years the revenues were practically doubled, 6000 miles of road were built, the construction of railways was begun, the first postage stamps ever used in India were issued, and so loyal was the province that he was able, when the Mutiny broke out, to hold Scinde with only 178 European soldiers. In 1862 he was appointed Governor of Bombay. Here he demolished insanitary buildings, introduced scavenging services, established a town council, founded a school for the education of the daughters of Indian gentlemen, and opened Government House freely to Indian gentlemen and their wives as well as Europeans.

On July 24 Miss Nightingale wrote to Douglas Galton: "If only we could get a Public Health Department in the India Office to ourselves with Sir B. Frere at the head of it, our fortunes would be made." She did not go to Embley in the summer of 1867. There was fresh hope of progress, and she stayed in London. Meanwhile in the summer of 1867 Sir John Lawrence threw another project into confusion. Three years ago he had asked Miss Nightingale to draw up a scheme for the employment of nurses in hospitals by the Bengal Sanitary Commission. The difficulties were enormous, largely owing to the very poor level of the Indian Medical Service. Miss Nightingale made notes of an interview on the scheme with a doctor holding the high rank of Deputy Inspector-General in Madras. "He came intent on proving to me that no matron was wanted. The Dr. ought to be Matron and wretched coolie women under the Dr. nurses. But, luckily for me, he was drunk. And before he went (he was here 2 1/2 hours) he had admitted everything. He described his lying-in hospital where 'the pupils deliver all the ordinary cases, without a midwife, and without a doctor. The Dr. comes in for the extraordinary cases.' . . . I said 'They are by to see the extraordinary cases delivered?' Here he got so drunk that he spent at least half an hour explaining to me that there was nothing to be seen that 'everything was under the bed clothes.' The lying-in patients were all fed by friends from outside and were always naked in bed---except the Europeans. There were 80 leper beds at the General Hospital, always full. He says 'It all answers very well!!'"

The attempt to employ female nurses must be made with the greatest caution, and she submitted a scheme for employing nurses in a single hospital and observing the result before embarking on any large undertaking. Sir John Lawrence turned the scheme over to the medical service, who blew it up into a grandiose plan for introducing female nursing on a large scale into seven hospitals simultaneously at great expense.

This scheme, not Miss Nightingale's, was submitted to the Government of India, who, she said very properly, rejected it. She was angry. It seemed that Dr. Sutherland was right and that Sir John Lawrence was her worst enemy. She decided to approach Sir Stafford Northcote, the new Secretary of State for India. He had indicated that he was prepared to hear from her; and on August 19, while she was debating whether the time was ripe to suggest a meeting, he wrote suggesting that he should call on her at South Street "for a little conversation."

She was nervous. "Hope was green and the donkey ate it (that's me)," she wrote to Douglas Galton on July 16. Nevertheless she determined to be bold. If she made an impression on Sir Stafford Northcote, she would ask, then and there, for the establishment of a department at the India Office with Sir Bartle Frere at the head of it to control the sanitary administration of India.

On August 20 Jowett wrote her a cautionary letter. "I am delighted to hear you are casting your toils about Sir Stafford Northcote. May I talk to you as I would to one of our undergraduates? Take care not to exaggerate to him."

The interview had already taken place. Sir Stafford had called at South Street on the day Jowett wrote, and the meeting had been a triumphant success. When Sir Stafford had gone, Miss Nightingale scribbled a note for Dr. Sutherland. "Well---I've won this. We are to have a department in the I.O. for Sanitary business. I don't know if he saw how afraid I was of him. For he kept his eyes tight shut all the time. And I kept mine wide open. . . . I liked Sir Stafford Northcote."

Once more the establishment of a public health service for India seemed just round the corner. "We will make 35 South Street the India Office till this is done," wrote Sir Bartle Frere.

The phrase touched a chord. Ten years ago when Sidney Herbert was alive, the Burlington Hotel had been called the little War Office, and Miss Nightingale scribbled on Sir Bartle Frere's letter "I miss him so." The wound had never healed. She passed each anniversary of his death, "that dreadful day," in meditation and prayer. On August 2 she dated her private letters "6 years ago," "7 years ago." Her grief was tenacious; she refused to be resigned, as she refused to accept compromise. To be resigned, to compromise was to accept the second best. That she would never do, and she kept grief with her. Grief was waiting for her when she turned from her work, grief with grief's companions---frustration, resentment, and remorse. And yet---if she had ceased to feel, she would have slackened. As great waves of resentment and grief surged up in her, she worked harder, vowed more furiously that she would never give way, never succumb to the low standards, the inefficiency, and the indifference of the world.

In the autumn of 1867 she did some of the hardest work of her life. On October 23 Sir Stafford Northcote came to see her again; the second interview was even more successful than the first. The names of the members of the Indian Sanitary Committee were agreed, and Sir Stafford consented to establish the authority of the Sanitary Committee as supreme in India. Further, he asked her to prepare a digest of the progress of the whole Indian Sanitary question from the setting up of the Sanitary Commission in 1859 to 1867.

She plunged into work at once. By the beginning of December she had completed the instructions for the Sanitary Committee, the Digest, and had added a Memorandum of Suggestions and Advice. In addition, on her own initiative, she had drafted an important dispatch requesting a report on sanitary progress with particular reference to the Suggestions in regard to Sanitary Works required for the Improvement of Indian Stations which had been sent to guide the Indian authorities as long ago as 1864. What was the present position, the Secretary of State for India wished to know? What results had been achieved? She submitted her draft with temerity---she was fully aware, she wrote, that Sir Stafford might disapprove the whole scheme. Sir Stafford accepted the suggestion almost in its entirety. The dispatch was sent; and the reports received from the Presidencies as a result were printed as a Blue Book in 1868 under the title of the India Office Sanitary Annual. In future reports were to be sent in by the Presidencies and published every year.

At last she had accomplished something. She had secured a Sanitary Department in the India Office with supreme authority in India; she had secured publication of annual reports which would prevent authorities in India from going to sleep. On February 16, 1868, she was able to write to M. Mohl in triumph: "By dint of remaining here for 13 months to dog the Minister I have got a little (not tart) but Department all to myself, called 'Of Public Health Civil and Military for India' with Sir B. Frere at the head of it. And I had the immense satisfaction 3 or 4 months ago of seeing 'Printed Despatch No. 1' of said Department. (I never in all my life before, saw any Despatch, Paper or Minute under at least No. 77,981.)"

Again she had paid a heavy price for her success. The thirteen months during which she had shut herself up in South Street working day and night had further impaired her health. She was slowing down. "I do the work in 3 hours I used to do in one," she told Clarkey in July, 1867. She would not spare herself on that account. If she were slower, the only consequence was that she must drive herself harder. Once more the limit of what she could inflict on herself was reached, and in December, 18675 after the autumn of grueling work for Sir Stafford Northcote, she collapsed completely. "I broke up all at once," she told M. Mohl in February, 1868, "and fled to Malvern on December 26 with a little cat."

Urgent work called her back---not Indian work; for the moment there was a lull in Indian affairs. She had other calls on her as exacting as India. While she had been working on the Indian Sanitary Commission, gigantic as her labors had been, they were not her only occupation. Her work for public health in England, for hospitals and the reorganization of nursing, had rapidly expanded and assumed enormous proportions.