Laura Richards - Florence Nightingale, the Angel of the Crimea - A Story for Young People

I wish I could tell you the whole beautiful story, but it would take too long. By the end of the year there were sixty patients in the hospital, and seven deaconess nurses to care for them. To-day there is a deaconess hospital or home in almost every town in Germany, and thousands upon thousands of sick and poor people bless the deaconesses, though they may never have heard the name of Pastor Fliedner.

Miss Nightingale spent two periods of training at Kaiserswerth. When she left it finally, good Pastor Fliedner laid his hands on her head and gave her his blessing in simple and earnest words; and she carried with her the love and good wishes of all the pious and benevolent community.

I wish we had a picture of her in her deaconess costume. The blue cotton gown, white apron and wide collar, and white muslin cap tied under the chin with a large bow, must have set off her pensive beauty very sweetly. She always kept a tender recollection of Kaiserswerth, and says in a letter: "Never have I met with a higher love and a purer devotion than there."

On her way home, Miss Nightingale spent some time with the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul in Paris. Here she saw what was probably the best nursing in the world at that time; and she studied the methods in her usual careful way, not only in the hospitals, but in the homes of the poor and suffering, where the good sisters came and went like ministering angels. She had still another opportunity, and this an unsought one, of learning what they had to teach, for she fell ill herself, and was tenderly cared for and restored to health by these skillful and devoted women.

Returning to England, she spent some time in the quiet of home, and as her strength returned, took up her old work of visiting among the sick and poor of the neighborhood. But this could not keep her long. It was not that she did not love it, and did not love her home dearly, but there were other benevolent ladies who could do this work. She realized this, and realized too, though perhaps unconsciously, that she could do harder work than this, and that there was plenty of hard work waiting to be done. She soon found it. A call came asking her to be superintendent of a Home for Sick Governesses in London, and she accepted it at once.

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