FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE AND LOUISA TWINING.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE is eighty-one. Her name was a household word before many of us were born. She was one of the few notable personalities revealed to the world by the Crimean War, and it is one of the bright features of that campaign that it set the example of Florence Nightingale before the women of England, and ennobled the profession of nursing. Miss Nightingale went out to Scutari, to find twenty-three hundred sick and wounded soldiers waiting for the touch of a gentle hand, and she had been there hardly twenty-four hours before five hundred more came into the hospitals. Men lay on bare floors, dying for want of the simplest attention, and all the arrangements for the comforts of the sick, even the ordinary commissariat, had broken down. Thus Florence Nightingale found Scutari; how she left it we all know. Ask of the men who are still left of the Crimean army. Not an angel from heaven could have been more welcome than the brave nurse who moved about day and night in the hospital at Scutari—the lady with the lamp, as she came to be known. The people of England gave her forty-five thousand pounds, which she gave back again in the form of a training-school for nurses; and Queen Victoria proposed her health in a toast. When the war was over, some soldiers at a banquet in London were asked to write down on a piece of paper the name which was dearest to them in connection with the war, and when the papers were collected there was only one name on them all. It was “Florence Nightingale.” The great work of Miss Nightingale’s life, which will last when the generation which knew her has passed away, is that she pioneered a new era of nursing. She is the mother of the trained nurse, and it is due to her, more perhaps than to any other woman, that nursing Mrs. Gamp has been either lost, stolen, or strayed beyond recovery. Nursing in Miss Nightingale’s early days was a profession to which it was almost a shame to belong. The nurses at London workhouses were much oftener drunk than sober, which is hardly to be wondered at, perhaps, seeing that they were paid largely in beer, gin being substituted when their duties were particularly repulsive. One poor patient was in such a pitiful plight that not even a pauper nurse could be got to attend him, and finally a man in the street—he was a useful figure even in those days—volunteered to attend him in consideration of a daily allowance of two pints of beer and some gin, “with chops and ’steak for dinner.” Another brave woman was associated with Miss Nightingale in the work of uplifting the nursing profession, and she, too, is still living to see the happier state of things which has now been brought about. Miss Louisa Twining, who came into the world six months after Florence Nightingale, is still living at Rochester. She has transformed Mr. Bumble, as Miss Nightingale has transformed Mrs. Gamp. For nearly half a century Miss Twining devoted herself to the reformation of our workhouses, and she stood almost alone when, in the first half of last century, she began the beneficent work which has brought about such gigantic changes in the lives of the poorest of the poor. The state of our workhouses in those far-off days was such as we can scarcely imagine now. Miss Twining remembers a master of a workhouse in London—an ex-policeman appointed by the chairman of a board of guardians in recognition of personal services rendered—who was pelted out of the workhouse with old kettles and shovels. He ruled the paupers with a rod of iron, yet he managed to secure two other posts as workhouse master before he threw himself in front of a train and relieved the world of his presence. At another London workhouse there was a medical officer whose boast it was that he did not believe in medicine, and treated the patients with nothing but water, colored according to the disease it was meant to cure, and flavored with peppermint and other essences. This philosopher thrived in his position until 1873! Miss Twining, who will be eighty-one this year, has a volume of interesting memories. Her father was one of the volunteers enrolled during the panic caused by the expected invasion of England by Napoleon; and her brothers studied under Dr. Arnold at Rugby. She heard Mendelssohn play; saw Charles Kemble and Helen Faucit frequently when13at the height of their popularity, and witnessed the entry of Louis Napoleon into Paris in 1852. She sat by the fire in the long winter nights of 1838, waiting for “Nicholas Nickleby” to come out in monthly parts. An odd incident in Miss Twining’s experience occurred in connection with the establishment of the first home for workhouse girls in New Ormond Street in 1861. On the birthday of Queen Victoria one year, they discovered a foundling named Victoria Queen, whom they succeeded in reclaiming from the misery of her surroundings, and who afterward married a carpenter named Albert Edward. Miss Twining tells a curious story, too, of a sermon of Charles Kingsley’s. A London vicar had invited Kingsley, Maurice, and Robertson to preach at his church, and Miss Twining was present once when the author of “Westward Ho!” was in the pulpit. When he had finished, the vicar of the church ascended the pulpit and protested against the sermon.—St. James’ Gazette.