joyfully for Him and His.  Nor was this choice, which she felt to be a life-choice, a thought but of yesterday.  Not long after she went to Kaiserswerth she had, as she herself writes, “much watching of a poor dying man; sitting alone by him in that little room, day after day, it went to my heart to hear some of his requests refused, and to see the food given him, so unfitted to his state.  And I sat there and thought, ’If these be the trials of the sick in an institution conducted on Christian principles, oh, how must it be in those institutions in our own land, where no true charity is in the hearts of most of the heads or hands that work them!’ and I then and there dedicated myself to do what I could for Ireland, in its workhouses, infirmaries, and hospitals.”  She felt too, that although she could do good service for her Lord in ordinary Christian work, she could do still better if, possessing as she did a God-given talent for nursing, she could, like her Master, both speak a “word in season” and minister to the needs of the body.

So St. Thomas’s was entered, entered with the hope and prayer that both amongst nurses and patients God would use her.  And use her He did, as He does all who cry, “Lord, what wilt Thou have me do?” and then watch for the opportunity to do it.  It was not long before she sought and gained permission to establish a Bible class for the other Nightingale nurses, which proved a great blessing to several of them.  In her ward, too, she was often able to speak a word for Christ to the patients.

She was very happy in her busy life, writing, “I am so growingly happy in it, and so fond of nay work.”  Of its importance she became more and more convinced, and in a letter written from Barnet, where she was spending a few happy days with her friends, Mr. and Mrs. Pennefather, she says:—­“My work, I more and more feel it, for the worst things only make me realise how Christian and really good nurses are needed.”

But it was to Ireland that her thoughts ever turned, and it was of work in Ireland that she was thinking even while training in London For by this very training she hoped to be the better fitted for work in her own beloved country.  “Ireland is ever my bourn,” she wrote.  And again:—­“My heart is ever in Ireland, where I hope ultimately to work.”

After a year at St. Thomas’s, and a short visit home, she returned to London to take the superintendence of a small hospital in connection with the Deaconesses’ Institution in Burton Crescent.  Here she had all the nursing to do, as there were but few patients, and she had great joy in ministering to them.  “I trust,” she writes in a letter to her aunt, “I am gaining a quiet influence with my patients; they are my great pleasure.”  And again:  “I am very happy here among my patients, and often feel God has sent me here; I have two revival patients; one had found peace before she came, the other is seeking it, and to both I can talk.  Then I have a poor woman with cancer, who likes me to speak of Jesus, whom I believe she truly loves; so you see I am not without work.”