of nursing the sick, and other offices of charity.  For three months she remained in daily and nightly attendance, accumulating the most valuable practical experience, and then returned home to patiently wait until an occasion should arise for its exercise.  This occasion soon arose; for, after attending various hospitals in London, the cry of distress which, in 1854, arose from the distressed soldiery in Russia, enlisted her warmest sympathies.  Lady Mary Forester, Mrs. Sidney Herbert, and other ladies, proposed to send nurses to the seat of war.  The government acceded to their request, and Miss Florence Nightingale, Mrs. Bracebridge, and thirty-seven others, all experienced nurses, went out to their assistance, and arrived at Constantinople on the 5th of November.  The whole party were soon established in the hospital at Scutari, and there pursued their labor of love and benevolence.  The good they did, and the wonders they accomplished, are too well known to need particular detail.  “Every day,” says one, writing from the military hospital, “brought some new combination of misery to be somehow unraveled by the power ruling in the sisters’ town.  Each day had its peculiar trial to one who has taken such a load of responsibility in an untried field, and with a staff of her own sex, all new to it.  She has frequently been known to stand twenty hours, on the arrival of fresh detachments of sick, apportioning quarters, distributing stores, directing the labors of her corps, assisting at the most painful operations, where her presence might soothe or support, and spending hours over men dying of cholera or fever.  Indeed, the more awful to every sense any particular case might be, the more certainly might her slight form be seen bending over him, administering to his case by every means in her power, and seldom quitting his side until death had released him.  And yet, probably, Miss Nightingale’s personal devotion in the cause was, in her own estimation, the least onerous of her duties.  The difficulties thrown in her way by the formalities of system and routine, and the prejudices of individuals, will scarcely be forgotten, or the daily contests by which she was compelled to wring from the authorities a scant allowance of the appliances needed in the daily offices of her hand, until the co-operation of Mr. Macdonald, the distributor of the Times fund, enabled her to lay in stores, to institute separate culinary and washing establishments, and, in short, to introduce comfort and order into the department over which she presided.”  And so, during the greater part of the momentous campaign, she did the work that she had set out to do, bravely and faithfully, and earnestly and well; and we may be sure that on her return to England she was welcomed gladly.  The queen presented her with a costly diamond ornament, to be worn as a decoration, and accompanied it with an autograph letter, in which her great merits were fully, gracefully,