it was afterwards put. The arrangement of the wards was inconvenient, and there were no proper quarters for the nurses and attendants. Her own room, which she shared with another lady, the day-nurse of the ward, was a small, uncarpeted apartment in the fourth story, with a window every pane of which was cracked, a fireplace possessing neither tongs nor shovel, and a miserable closet infested by rats and black bugs. Its furniture consisted of two iron bedsteads provided with unpleasantly meager mattresses, two trunks, two tables, two chairs, a tiny mirror, a tin basin, a blue pitcher, and a pair of yellow mugs. The walls were whitewashed, and the windows were draped with sheets.
Her fare was in accordance with these surroundings. It rarely varied, and it was not good. Moreover, she did not have enough of it, since if she did not appear promptly at table she found nothing left there for her to eat, and it was impossible for her to be punctual with so many sick men demanding her attention. The attendants, too, were convalescents, and were not physically able to cope with the tasks assigned them, so that to spare them she did the work of at least three persons. Under such circumstances it is scarcely to be wondered at that her health broke down and her hospital experiences terminated in a dangerous attack of typhoid fever.
Her struggle with the disease was protracted and severe, and although, thanks to an originally fine constitution, she at last recovered, she lost her beautiful hair, and has never since been the strong and healthy woman she was before she enlisted as a nurse.
The "Hospital Sketches," in which she describes the scenes among which she labored, first appeared separately in a Boston paper, and were afterwards gathered together into a volume. They were her first great literary success. Issued at a time when the public was hungry for every
