The trust that's given guard, and to yourself be just.
—Dana
For live howe'er we may, yet die we must.
—Shakespeare
—Good Housekeeping.
(1786)
As I passed down through India I saw two little rice-fields side by side. One was green and growing; the other was dead and dry. I looked for the cause. The great lake was full of water. There was no lack there. Into the one the living water was flowing, for the channel was open. The other was choked. Brother, is your life green and growing, fruitful and joyful, or barren and dry because the channel is choked?—G. S. Eddy, "Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions," 1910.
(1787)
LIFE A CYCLE
An old man who was just one hundred
and three years of age, recently died in Chester,
England. Not long before his death he
tried to get out of bed, and they said to him:
"Father, where do you want to go? What
do you want to do?" He answered, "Father
is calling me to breakfast." He repeated it
two or three times—"Father is calling me to
breakfast." The old man had become a child
again. He was in his little trundle-bed again
hearing his father's voice up the stairway
calling him to come to breakfast.
So when we have traveled around the
circle of life, we get into the childhood
of our old age, and hear the voices of
the friends of our youth, which is one
of the evidences of the belief that we
shall hear those voices again. We would
not thus recall them nor remember them
if we were not to hear them again.
(1788)
LIFE, A DEVOTED
Florence Nightingale, heroine of the Crimean
War Nursing Service, as a child at
Lea Hurst, was accustomed to minister to
the sick poor, and it so happened that the
clergyman of the parish was a man of considerable
medical skill. Curiously enough,
it was an animal that first turned her
thoughts to nursing—the dog of her father's
shepherd. Poor Cap's leg was thought to
have been broken and he was about to be
destroyed, when the girl, under the clergyman's
direction, prepared a simple hot compress
and soon had the delight of seeing her
patient convalescent. The fame of this
exploit spread abroad, and many an animal
was brought to her to be healed; perhaps
that was why she always advocated that sick
people should have dumb pets about them if
possible. As she grew older, the little girl
who had instinctively bandaged her broken
dolls in the most professional manner was
allowed to attend to the wounds and ailments
of real people, and this at a time when
ambulance classes were unheard of, and when
the only sick nurses available were ignorant
and untrained women. Miss Florence did
not find the ordinary life of a girl in society
appealed to her. With characteristic decision
she gave it up and spent the next few years
in visiting hospitals in England, Ireland and
Scotland. It is easy to see now that the
great want of those days was trained women
nurses, but it required exceptional intelligence—indeed,
we might almost say, a touch
of genius, to see it then in the late forties.
The question was how to supply the need;
characteristically again, Miss Nightingale began
with herself. In 1851 she entered the
Society of Sisters of Mercy, a Protestant
institution at Kaiserverth on the Rhine, for
training deaconesses or nursing sisters. Here
she thoroughly qualified herself as a nurse,
and on her return to London she devoted
much time and money to the Governesses'
Sanatorium in Harley Street.
The autumn of 1854 saw the beginning of the enterprise for which all this time she had been unconsciously preparing herself. The country was being horrified by the tidings which continually came home of the appalling mismanagement of the military hospitals in the Crimea. Our gallant soldiers were dying by hundreds for lack of the simplest and most elementary nursing. It seemed, as religious people say, a clear "call" to this country squire's daughter, and that very evening she wrote to Mr. Sidney Herbert (afterward Lord Herbert of Lea), the Secretary at War, and sketched her plan. At the very same time Mr. Herbert himself was writing to her to ask if she would organize and take out a company of nurses and the two letters crossed in the post. In October, 1854, Miss Nightingale started for the East with thirty-eight nurses in her command, some of whom were naturally nuns. The day after her arrival came the wounded from Balaklava, quickly followed by six hundred wounded from Inkerman and
