blished in the Cottage Hospital at Walsall; for we feel that then she had at last discovered her true sphere of labour (1865).

She had a great deal to learn, for she had had no regular training in the art of nursing, but she had the will and the capacity. Her special ambition was to prove a good surgical nurse; and her tenacious memory and keen faculty of observation assisted her in discerning the character of wounds and the exact position of fractures. Her coolness, courage, and talent gave her an immediate command over the rough men, colliers and operatives, who were her principal patients, while her beauty and her charm of manner and her ready sympathy drew their hearts towards her, so that they became her willing slaves. Constitutionally able to bear, without disgust or shrinking, the terrible details of loathsome diseases and ghastly accidents, her profound pity for human suffering gave a lighter touch to her skilful hand and a warmer light to her beaming eye. She moved to and fro in the hospital wards like an angel sent down from Heaven to bless and to save. The wounded bore their agony more patiently when she looked upon them; the dying yielded their last breath more calmly if she sat by their side. A beautiful and a fascinating woman, to whom was open the path of wedded life, with its fair prospects of domestic happiness, she deliberately chose a lot which brought her into hourly contact with pain and affliction in their most repellent aspects, because she felt that in such a lot she could best exercise her varied powers, and lift up others to her own moral heigh'. And she accepted it with so much enthusiasm, and with so fine an aptitude, that "Sister Dora" soon became a household word in Walsall, and a type of self-sacrifice and ardent Christian zeal.

Walsall, as everybody knows, is a large and populous town situated on the borders of "the Black Country," amid a labyrinth of tall chimneys, which vomit forth clouds of smoke and tongues of flame, darkening the heavens with a pall of lurid gloom, and filling the atmosphere with a pungent odour. Here, on the brow of a hill, a new hospital was erected in 1867, and placed under the charge of Sister Dora, who, out of her private means, had given liberally towards its erection. It contained twenty-eight beds, but, at need, could accommodate a larger number; and was so arranged that the entire nursing could be done by one person, if that person possessed Sister Dora's activity of mind and body.

HOSPITAL WORK AT WALSALL.

381

The three wards into which it was divided opened upon one another in such a manner that when she read prayers she could be heard distinctly by the inmates of all. The out-patient department was connected with it by a glass passage, which Sister Dora's taste converted into a greenhouse. The hospital windows overlooked a garden, and a breadth of green turf, and clusters of trees and shrubs, which defied the smoke. At the bottom of the hill ran the South Staffordshire railway, and the passage of the trains afforded a constant amusement to the patients, especially to those connected with the railway, who were able to recognise the driver of each passing engine by his peculiar and characteristic whistle.

In 1868 the hospital was opened, under the personal superintendence of Sister Dora. The same year was marked by an outbreak of small-pox in Walsall, which added greatly to her labours, as, after her hospital-work was done, she sped from house to house to tend the unhappy sufferers. "One night," says her biographer, "she was sent for by a poor man who was much attached to her, and who was dying of what she called 'black-pox,' a violent form of small-pox. She went at once, and found him almost in the last extremity. All his relations had fled, and a neighbour alone was with him, doing what she could for him. When Sister Dora found that only one small piece of candle was left in the house, she gave the woman some money, begging her to go and find some means of light, while she stayed with the man. She sat on by his bed, but the woman, who had probably spent. the money at the public-house, never returned; and after some little while, the dying man raised himself up in bed with a last effort, saying, 'Sister, kiss me before I die.' She took him all covered as he was with the loathsome disease, into her arms, and: kissed him, the candle going out almost as she did so, leaving them in total darkness. He implored her not to leave him while he lived, although he might have known she would never do that. It was then past midnight, and she sat on, for how long she knew not, until he died. Even then she waited, fancying, as she could not see him, that he might be still alive, till in the early dawn she groped her way to the door, and went to find some neighbours." Than this the annals of heroism present few finer instances of generous and self-sacrificing courage. Is it wonderful that a woman capable of such deeds became the idol of the poorer

classes of Walsall,-that the rough, rude men who wrought in its coal-pits and iron-works would have died for her, as she would have died for them? No doubt there was some slight alloy of baser metal in the gold. Sister Dora was proud of her power, and not insensibie to the homage she received. But against this admixture of human weakness she strove very resolutely; and after all, it does but bring her nearer to our sympathies. Otherwise she had been something too perfect, too pure and good for human nature's daily food; whereas it is as a woman, with a woman's tenderness and devotion, and something of a woman's foibles, that we love to regard her.

To what is known as conservative surgery, a surgery that seeks to save rather than to cut away the diseased or broken limb, Sister Dora paid special attention, and in this department she attained a remarkable degree of success, owing, I think, to her patience and tenacity, and womanly dexterity and delicacy of manipulation. A fine vigorous young man was brought into the hospital one night, whose arm had been torn and twisted by a machine. The doctor pronounced immediate amputation indispensable. Observing the sufferer's look of despair, and moved by his agonized lamentation, Sister Dora scrutinized the wounded limb very carefully. "Oh, Sister!" exclaimed the man; save my arm for me, it's my right arm!" She turned to the surgeon. "I believe I can save it if you will let me try." "Are you mad? I tell you it's an impossibility; mortification will set in in a few hours; nothing but amputation can save his life." To the anxious patient she said, simply: "Are you willing for me to try and save your arm, my man?" His consent was rapturously given. The doctor walked angrily away, saying: "Well, Sister, remember it's your arm if you choose to have the young man's death upon your conscience, I shall not interfere; but I wash my hands of him. Don't think I am going to help you." Heavy as the responsibility was, she accepted it, encouraged by the patient's evident confidence in her; and for three weeks she watched and tended his arm, and prayed over it, day and night. At the end of that time, catching the doctor in one of his most amiable moods, she asked him to examine the limb; and with no little reluctance, for no professional man likes to be proved in the wrong, he complied. There it was, straight, firm, and healthy!

SISTER DORA'S GREAT TACT AND SURGICAL SKILL. 383

"Why, you have saved it!" cried the doctor, "and it will be a useful arm to him for many a long year."

We shall not attempt to describe Sister Dora's feelings, in which a sense of triumph was not unnaturally mixed with thankfulness; or those of the patient, who thenceforth became one of her loyalest admirers. He went by the name of "Sister's Arm," and after he ceased to be an in-patient, constantly came to have his limb looked at,—that is, to gaze on the noble and devoted woman who had done him so great a service.

"Stop

Not the least remarkable of her qualifications was her tact. She managed her patients with as much address as the most experienced diplomatist could handle the Powers on the political chessboard. A man who had been brought into the hospital seriously hurt, swore all the time she was dressing his wounds. that!" said she, abruptly; and the man did stop, only to begin again when the pain returned. "What's the good of it?" said Sister Dora; "that won't make it any easier to bear." "No, but I must say something when it comes so bad on me, Sister." "Very well, then, say 'poker and tongs."" And "poker and tongs" was adopted by the ward in place of unseemly oaths.

Her genial humour and love of fun diffused a pleasant atmosphere through the Hospital. She would invent games for the boys, and sometimes sit down with a patient at chess or draughts. Men of the working classes have very little genuine amusement in their lives; hard work and dull homes weigh upon them with a constant pressure; and the monotony of dulness which surrounds them is, I think, one of the painfullest results of nineteenth-cen tury civilisation. Judge then of the freshness and novelty of the scene which that Hospital presented! A beautiful and cultivated woman, who knew how to preserve her dignity, whom they instinctively felt to be immeasurably above them, could yet joke and laugh with them every day, could raise their spirits by her delightful humour, had always a ready answer to their questions, and inspired them with a pure and wholesome merriment of which previously they had had no conception. "Make you laugh!" said a big Irishman; “she'd make you laugh when you were dying!" Truly, she realized the graceful words of the ward, and made a sunshine in a shady place!

From Miss Lonsdale's admirable biography of "Sister Dora"

we borrow the following account of an average day's work at Walsall Hospital, as recorded by one of Sister Dora's ladypupils :

Sister Dora used to come down into the wards at half-past six in the morning, make the beds of all the patients who were able to get up, and give them their breakfasts, until half-past seven, when it was time for her own breakfast. The bright, sunshiny way she always worked, with a smile and a pleasant word for every one, was in itself a medicine of the best kind. She would quote proverbs or apt pithy sayings, and she often asked questions which would set all the men thinking-such as "What is a gentleman?" By the time she came back into the wards, they would have their answers ready. "To go to church with a gold watch in your pocket" constituted a gentleman, according to one man. "To be rich and well-dressed, and have a lot of fellows under you," was another answer. Some men were more thoughtful, and said, "Nay; that won't make a gentleman." But although most of them knew what a gentleman was not, they found a great difficulty in defining what he was. Then would Sister Dora, while she was dressing the wounds, or going about her work, give them her own views on the subject, and show how a man could be rich and well dressed, and yet be no gentleman. She told me once that she often cried when she went to bed at night to think how many good words she might have spoken in season to her men. She used generally to invent some queer nickname for each of them, in order that they might (as she said) the sooner forget their former lives and associations, if those had been bad. Thus one man would always be spoken of as "King Charles" (even having it written upon his egg for breakfast), because his face suggested Charles the First to Sister Dora. "Darkey," and "Cockney," and "Pat," and "Stumpy," would answer to no other names. Rude, rough fellows, of course, constantly came in; nobody had ever seen such a woman as this before, so beautiful, so good, so tender-hearted, so strong and so gentle, so full of fun and humour, and of sympathy for broken hearts as well as for every other kind of fracture, and the best friend that many of these poor maimed men had ever known. She was the personification of goodness and unselfishness to them; skilful and rapid in her work,—a great matter where wounds