SOURCE: "Florence Nightingale," in Heroines of Modern Progress, The Macmillan Company, 1935, pp. 120-46.

In the following essay, Adams and Foster examine Nightingale's life and character.

Florence Nightingale, when a child, had a large family of dolls. One day when she was entertaining them at a garden party on her father's estate in Derbyshire, her dog seized one in his teeth and scurried away for a romp with it. Florence rescued the doll a few minutes later. Sawdust was pouring out of a large rip in the side. But she did not mourn over the mishap; nor did she throw the tattered playmate away and ask her parents for another to fill its place. She stuffed fresh sawdust into the doll, until it was as plump as ever, and then bound her handkerchief neatly over the hole. And thereafter this doll, from all the large family, was the girl's...