Miss Nightingale has much humor, and she shows it in her writings.  She is opposed to dark houses; says they promote scrofula; to old papered walls, and to carpets full of dust.  An uninhabited room becomes full of foul air soon, and needs to have the windows opened often.  She would keep sick people, or well, forever in the sunlight if possible, for sunlight is the greatest possible purifier of the atmosphere.  “In the unsunned sides of narrow streets, there is degeneracy and weakliness of the human race,—­mind and body equally degenerating.”  Of the ruin wrought by bad air, she says:  “Oh, the crowded national school, where so many children’s epidemics have their origin, what a tale its air-test would tell!  We should have parents saying, and saying rightly, ’I will not send my child to that school; the air-test stands at “horrid."’ And the dormitories of our great boarding-schools!  Scarlet fever would be no more ascribed to contagion, but to its right cause, the air-test standing at ‘Foul.’  We should hear no longer of ‘Mysterious Dispensations’ and of ’Plague and Pestilence’ being in ‘God’s hands,’ when, so far as we know, He has put them into our own.”  She urges much rubbing of the body, washing with warm water and soap.  “The only way I know to remove dust, is to wipe everything with a damp cloth....  If you must have a carpet, the only safety is to take it up two or three times a year, instead of once....  The best wall now extant is oil paint.”

“Nursing is an art; and if it is to be made an art, requires as exclusive a devotion, as hard a preparation, as any painter’s or sculptor’s work; for what is the having to do with dead canvas or cold marble compared with having to do with the living body, the temple of God’s Spirit?  Nursing is one of the fine arts; I had almost said, the finest of the fine arts.”

Miss Nightingale has also written Observations on the Sanitary State of the Army in India, 1863; Life or Death in India, read before the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, 1873, with an appendix on Life or Death by Irrigation, 1874.

She is constantly doing deeds of kindness.  With a subscription sent recently by her to the Gordon Memorial Fund, she said:  “Might but the example of this great and pure hero be made to tell, in that self no longer existed to him, but only God and duty, on the soldiers who have died to save him, and on boys who should live to follow him.”

Miss Nightingale has helped to dignify labor and to elevate humanity, and has thus made her name immortal.

Florence Nightingale died August 13, 1910, at 2 P.M., of heart failure, at the age of ninety.  She had received many distinguished honors:  the freedom of the city of London in 1908, and from King Edward VII, a year previously, a membership in the Order of Merit, given only to a select few men; such as Field Marshal Roberts, Lord Kitchener, Alma Tadema, James Bryce, George Meredith, Lords Kelvin and Lister, and Admiral Togo.