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 C2
 
 Florence Xigiitinc;ai.e. 
 
 Frakces KiuLEV Havergal. 
 
 Catherine Mahsii. 
 
 Mrs. Ranvard (" L. N. R.").
 
 THE WORLD'S WORKERS. 
 
 Florence Nighting ale. 
 Frances Ridley Havcrgal. 
 Ca therine Marsh. 
 Mrs. Ranyard ("ln.r."). 
 
 BY 
 
 LIZZIE ALLDRIDGE. 
 
 CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited: 
 
 LONDON, PARIS, NEW YORK, Sf A MELBOURNE. 
 
 1885. 
 
 [all KIGHTS RESERVED.]
 
 
 r 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Florence Nightingale 5 
 
 Frances Ridley Havergal 35 
 
 Catherine Marsh 65 
 
 Mrs. Ranyard ("L.N.R.") 99 
 
 6306."'^ 
 
 ►«->v>
 
 FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. 
 
 EVERYONE who knows London at all knows 
 ' the Houses of Parliament at the foot of West- 
 minster Bridge. Across the. bridge on the Surrey 
 b^ak, lust opposite the _great Gothic Houses where 
 legislators talk and govern, stands the new St. Thomas's 
 Hospital, where sick folk suffer, get cured, or die ; 
 where young doctors " walk," and older ones teach ; 
 where experienced nurses tend the sick, and where 
 probationers are trained. 
 
 Let us go over the crowded bridge, through the 
 long corridors of the hospital, and enter a large room^ 
 where tables are neatly laid for a numerous com- 
 pany, and there look at a statuette under a glass 
 shade on a pedestal. There she stands, a minister- 
 ing woman. Her dress is the simple garb of 
 common life, as it was in the days of the Crimean 
 War, with no separating badge to mark her off 
 from her fellow-beings. In one hand she holds 
 a nurse's night-lamp, with the other she shades 
 the light from the eyes of the sick faces she is watch- 
 ing. You do not see their faces, but you know 
 that she sees them ; on every line of hers you read
 
 6 The World's Workers. 
 
 how carefully and wisely, and with what clear know- 
 ledge and gentle womanliness she is pondering 
 what she sees. . 
 
 It is a statuette of Florence Nightingale. It 
 stands in the dining-room of the Nightingale 
 Home, St. Thomas's Hospital ; where those who 
 have eyes and hearts and brains may study it, and 
 learn the lessons taught with such quiet, unobtrusive 
 force. 
 
 That Nightingale Home is part of the British 
 nation^s tribute of thanks to the noble woman 
 who found the death-rate in the Barrack Hos- 
 pital at Scutari 60 per cent., and left it a fraction 
 over I, 
 
 The Nichtincrale Home is established for the 
 purpose of training nurses. Two classes of women 
 are admitted : those who are termed " nurse pro- 
 bationers ; " and gentlewomen, who are " special 
 probationers." 
 
 A very distinguished lady nurse who has been in 
 half the hospitals in Europe once said to me, " To 
 Florence Nightingale, who was my own first teacher 
 and inspirer, we owe the wonderful change that has 
 taken place in the public mind with regard to nurs- 
 ing. When I first began my hospital training, hospital 
 nursing was thought to be a profession which no 
 decent woman of any rank could follow. If a servant 
 turned nurse, it was supposed she did so because she 
 had lost her character. We have changed all that
 
 Florence Nightingale. y 
 
 now. Modern nursing owes its first impulse to Florence 
 Nightingale." 
 
 I don't suppose that any of my young readers have 
 ever seen a hospital nurse of the now nearly extinct 
 Gamp type ; but I have. I have seen her, coarse- 
 faced, thick of limb, heavy of foot, brutal in speech, 
 crawling up and down the stairs or about the wards in 
 dresses and aprons that made me feel (although quite 
 well and with a good healthy appetite) as if I would 
 rather not have my dinner just then. These were the 
 old-fashioned " Sairey Gamps." But Florence Night- 
 ingale has been too strong for even the immortal 
 " Sairey." Go now through the corridors and wards of 
 a modern hospital ; every nurse you meet will be neat 
 and trim with spotless dress and cap and apron, 
 moving quietly but quickly to and fro, doing her 
 work with kindness and intelligence. 
 
 The Nightingale Home itself is charming ; and 
 many, were they to see the little white beds and 
 pleasant rooms of the probationers, or were to stand 
 at the windows of the wards, overlooking the busy 
 Thames and the opposite Houses of Parliament, or to 
 meet the probationers trooping down to dinner, some in 
 their soft grey alpacas, which tell they have just come 
 from the lecture-room, and others, in print gowns and 
 white aprons, from the wards, would desire to become 
 "Nightingales.^' But this is no easy matter : no one 
 is admitted before twenty-three years of age ; 
 the preliminary training is very thorough, and they
 
 8 The World's Workers. 
 
 have to work very hard ; most of them find it try- 
 ing at first ; indeed, every woman must be sure 
 of her vocation before she attempts the work, inte- 
 resting as it is to those who care for it in the highest 
 spirit. 
 
 It was in 1820, the year George the Third's long 
 life quite faded out, that the younger of the two 
 daughters of William Shore Nightingale was born at 
 Florence, and named after that lovely city. 
 
 Mr. Nightingale, of Embley Park, Hampshire, and 
 the Lea Hurst, Derbyshire, was a very wealthy land- 
 owner. He was of the Shores of Derbyshire, but 
 inherited the fortune with the name of Nightingale 
 through his mother. H Lea Hurst, where Miss Night- 
 ingale passed the summer months of each year, is 
 situated in the Matlock district, among bold masses 
 of limestone rock, gray walls, full of fossils, covered 
 with moss and lichen, with the changeful river Der- 
 went now dashing over its stony bed, now quietly 
 winding between little dales with clefts and dingles. 
 Those who have travelled by the Derby and Buxton 
 railway will remember the narrow valleys, the 
 mountain streams, the wide spans of high moorland, 
 the distant ranges of hills beyond hills of the district. 
 Lea Hurst, a gable-ended house, standing among 
 its own woods and commanding wonderful views of 
 the Peak country, is about two miles from Cromford 
 station. 
 
 At Lea Hurst much of Plorence Nightingale's
 
 Florence Nightingale. 9 
 
 childhood was passed. There she early developed 
 that intense love for every livini^ suffering thing that 
 grew with her growth, until it became the master- 
 passion of her life. 
 
 A few years since a true story of her as a little 
 girl appeared in Little Folks Magazine, and it is so 
 charmingly told, and gives so distinctly the key-note 
 of her character, that I repeat it here in full, as to 
 curtail it would be to spoil it : — 
 
 Some years ago, when the celebrated Florence 
 Nightingale was a little girl, living at her father's 
 home, a large, old Elizabethan house with great woods 
 about it, in Hampshire, there was one thing that struck 
 everybody who knew her. It was that she seemed to 
 be always thinking what she could do to please or 
 help any one who needed either help or comfort. She 
 was very fond, too, of animals, and she was so gentle 
 in her way, that even the shyest of them would come 
 quite close to her, and pick up whatever she flung 
 down for them to eat. There was, in the garden be- 
 hind the house, a long walk with trees on each side, 
 the abode of many squirrels ; and when Florence came 
 down the walk, dropping nuts as she went along, the 
 squirrels would run down the trunks of their trees, and 
 hardly waiting until she passed by, would pick up the 
 prize, and dart away with their little bushy tails curled 
 over their backs, and their black eyes looking about 
 as if terrified at the least noise, though they did not 
 seem to be afraid of Florence. The reason was that
 
 lo The World's Workers. 
 
 she loved them, and never did anything to startle 
 or trouble them. 
 
 Then there was an old grey pony, named Peggy, 
 past work, living in a paddock, with nothing to do all 
 day long but to amuse herself. Whenever Florence 
 appeared at the gate, Peggy would come trotting up 
 and put her nose into the dress pocket of her little 
 mistress, and pick it of the apple or the roll of bread 
 that she knew she would always find there, for this 
 was a trick Florence had taught the pony. Florence 
 was fond of riding, and her father's old friend 
 (the clergyman of the parish) used often to come 
 and take her for a ride with him when he went to the 
 farm cottages at a distance. He was a good man, and 
 very kind to the poor. As he had studied medicine 
 when a young man, he was able to tell the people 
 what would do them good when they were ill, 
 or had met with an accident. Little Florence took 
 great delight in helping to nurse those who were ill, 
 and whenever she went on these long rides, she had 
 a small basket fastened to her saddle, filled with 
 something nice, which she had saved from her break- 
 fast or dinner, or carried for her mother, who was 
 very good to the poor. She thus learned to be useful 
 as well as kind-hearted. 
 
 Now, there lived in one of two or three solitary 
 cottages in the wood, an old shepherd of her father's, 
 named Roger, who had a favourite sheep-dog called 
 Cap. Roger had neither wife nor child, and Cap lived
 
 Florence Nightingale. ii 
 
 with him, and kept him company at nights, after 
 he had penned his flock. Cap was a very sensible 
 dog; indeed, people used to say he "could do every- 
 thing but speak." He kept the sheep in wonderfully 
 good order, and thus saved his master a great deal of 
 trouble. One day as Florence and her old friend were 
 out for a ride, they came to a field, where they found 
 the shepherd giving his sheep their night feed ; 
 but he was without the dog, and the sheep knew it, 
 for they were scampering about in all directions. 
 Florence and her friend noticed that the old shepherd 
 looked very sad this evening, and they stopped to 
 ask what was the matter, and what had become of 
 his dog. 
 
 " Oh," said Roger, " Cap will never be of any more 
 use to me ; I'll have to hang him, poor fellow, as soon 
 as I go home to night." 
 
 " Hang him ! " said Florence. " Oh, Roger, 
 how wicked of you ! What has dear old Cap 
 done ? " 
 
 " He has done nothing," replied Roger ; " but he 
 will never be of any more use to me, and I cannot 
 afford to keep him for nothing ; one of the mischievous 
 schoolboys thro wed a stone at him yesterday, and 
 broke one of his legs." And the old shepherd's eyes 
 filled with tears, which he wiped away with his shirt- 
 sleeve; then he drove his spade deep in the ground 
 to hide what he felt, for he did not like to be seen 
 crying.
 
 12 The World's Workers. 
 
 " Poor Cap ! " he sighed, " he was as knowing_as_ 
 a human being almost." 
 
 " But are you sure his leg is broken ? " asked 
 Florence. 
 
 " Oh, yes, miss, it is broken safe enough ; he has 
 not put his foot to the ground since." 
 
 Florence and her friend rode on without saying 
 anything more to Roger, 
 
 " We will go and see poor Cap," said the vicar. 
 " I don't believe the leg is really broken. It would 
 take a big stone, and a hard blow, to break the leg of 
 a great dog like Cap." 
 
 " Oh, if you could but cure him, how glad Roger 
 would be ! '■* replied Florence. 
 
 They soon reached the shepherd's cottage ; but the 
 door was fastened, and when they moved the latch 
 such a furious barking was heard, that they drew back 
 startled. However, a little boy came out of the next 
 cottage, and asked if they wanted to go in, as Roger 
 had left the key with his mother. So the key was got, 
 and the door opened, and there on the bare brick floor 
 lay the dog, his hair dishevelled, and his eyes sparkling 
 with anger at the intruders. But when he saw the 
 little boy he grew pacified. Dogs always know their 
 friends. And when he looked at Florence, and heard 
 her call him " poor Cap," he began to wag his short 
 tail, and then crept from under the table, and lay 
 down at her feet. She took hold of one of his paws, 
 patted his old rough head, and talked to him, whilst
 
 Florence Nightingale. 13 
 
 her friend examined the injured leg. It was dread- 
 fully swollen, and hurt him very much to have it 
 examined ; but the dog knew it was meant kindly, 
 and though he moaned and winced with pain, he 
 licked the hands that were hurting him, 
 
 " It's only a bad bruise ; no bones are broken," 
 said her old friend ; " rest is all Cap needs ; he will 
 soon be well again." 
 
 " I am so glad,^' exclaimed Florence ; " but can we 
 do nothing for him ? he seems in such pain." 
 
 " There is one thing that would ease the pain, and 
 heal the leg all the sooner, and that is plenty of hot 
 water to foment the part." 
 
 " Well then," said Florence, " if that will do him 
 good, I will foment poor Cap's leg." 
 
 " I fear you will only scald yourself," replied 
 he. 
 
 But Florence had in the meantime struck a light 
 with the tinder-box, and lighted the fire, which was 
 already laid. She then set off to the other cottage 
 to get something to bathe the leg with. She found 
 an old flannel petticoat hanging up to dry, and 
 this she carried off, and tore up into slips, which she 
 wrung out in warm water, and laid them tenderly on 
 Cap's swollen leg. It was not long before the poor 
 dog felt the benefit of the application, and he looked 
 grateful, wagging his little stump of a tail in thanks. 
 On their way home they met the shepherd coming 
 slowly along, with a piece of rope in his hand.
 
 14 The World's Workers. 
 
 " Oh, Roger," cried Florence, " you are not to 
 hang poor old Cap ; his leg is not broken at all." 
 
 " No, he will serve you yet," said the vicar. 
 
 " Well, I be main glad to hear it," said the 
 shepherd, " and many thanks to you for going to 
 see him." 
 
 On the next morning Florence was up early, and 
 the first thing she did was to take two flannel petti- 
 coats to give the poor woman whose petticoat she 
 had torn up to bathe Cap. Then she went to the 
 dog, and was delighted to find the swelling of his leg 
 much less. She bathed it again, and Cap was as 
 grateful as before. 
 
 Two or three days afterwards Florence and her 
 friend were riding together, when they came up to 
 Roger and his sheep. This time Cap was watching 
 the sheep, though he was lying quite still, and 
 pretending to be asleep. When he heard the voice of 
 Florence speaking to his master, who was portioning 
 out the usual feed, his tail wagged and his eyes 
 sparkled, but he did not get up, for he was on duty. 
 The shepherd stopped his work, and as he glanced 
 at the dog with a merry laugh, said, " Do look at the 
 dog, miss ; he be so pleased to hear your voice.'" 
 Cap's tail went faster and faster. " I be glad," con- 
 tinued the old man, " I did not hang him. I be 
 greatly obliged to you, miss, and the vicar, for what 
 you did. But for you I would have hanged the best 
 dog I ever had in my life."
 
 Florence Nightingale. 15 
 
 Florence Nightingale always retained her belief in 
 animals. Many years afterwards, when her name was 
 known all over the world, she wrote : " A small pet 
 animal is often an excellent companion for the sick, 
 for long chronic cases especially. An invalid, in 
 giving an account of his nursing by a nurse and a 
 dog, infinitely preferred that of the dog. "Above 
 all," he said, " it did not talk." Even Florence 
 Nightingale's maimed dolls were tenderly nursed 
 and bandaged. 
 
 Mr. Nightingale was a man singularly in advance 
 of his time as regards the training of girls. The 
 " higher education of women," was unknown to the 
 general public in those days, but not to Mr. Nightin- 
 gale. His daughter was taught mathematics, and 
 studied the classics, history, and modern languages, 
 under her father's guidance. These last were after- 
 wards of the greatest use to her in the Crimea. 
 But she was no "learned lady;" only a well-edu- 
 cated Englishwoman, all round. She was an excel- 
 lent musician, and skilful in work with the needle ; 
 and the delicate trained touch thus acquired stood 
 her in good stead, for the soldiers used to say that 
 a wound which Miss Nightingale dressed " was sure 
 to get well." 
 
 She felt a strong craving for work, more even than 
 the schools and cottages, the care of the young, the 
 sick, and the aged (in which she followed her mother's 
 example) could afford her at her father's home.
 
 1 6 The World's Workers. 
 
 Mrs. Browning tells us to 
 
 *' Get leave to work 
 In this world; 'tis the best you get at all." 
 
 Florence Nightingale not only got leave to work, 
 but did so, very quietly but very persistently. And 
 so she became a pioneer for less courageous souls, 
 and won for them also " leave to work." Taught 
 by her father, she soon learned to distinguish between 
 what was really good work and which mere make- 
 believe. She had many opportunities even as a child 
 of seeing really fine, artistic work both in science and 
 art. She set up a high standard, and was never 
 satisfied with anything short of the best, either in 
 herself or others. It is a grand thing to know good 
 work when you see it. 
 
 The love of work, however, with Florence Night- 
 ingale always went hand in hand with that love 
 for every living thing in God's world, which was born 
 with her, and which was never crowded out by all 
 this education. As she grew up she more and 
 more felt that helpfulness was the first law of her 
 being ; but her reason and intellect having been 
 so carefully trained, she was thoroughly persuaded 
 that in order to help effectually, one must know 
 thoroughly both the cause of suffering and its radical 
 cure. 
 
 The study of nursing had an irresistible attraction 
 for her. Few people in England at that time valued
 
 Florence Nightingale. 17 
 
 nursing. Florence Nightingale was convinced that 
 indifference arose from the all but absolute ignorance 
 of what nursing should be, and she set herself to 
 acquire the necessary knowledge to enable her to 
 carry it out in the very best and most scientific way. 
 She never lost an opportunity of visiting a hospital 
 either at home or abroad. She gave up the life of 
 so-called "pleasure" which it was then considered a 
 young woman of her position ought to lead, and 
 after having very carefully examined innumerable 
 nursing institutions at home and abroad, at length 
 went to the well-known Pastor Fliedner's Deacon- 
 esses at Kaiserswerth, where she remained for several 
 months. 
 
 When " Sweet Agnes Jones," who was at one 
 time a " Nightingale " probationer at St. Thomas's, 
 was learning to nurse at Kaiserswerth several years 
 later, she found that Florence Nightingale was tenderly 
 remembered there, not only for her wonderful skill, 
 but for the earnestness with which she had tried to 
 win the souls of her sick people to Christ. 
 
 After leaving Kaiserswerth, Miss Nightingale was 
 for a while with the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul 
 in Paris, so anxious was she to sec how nursing was 
 carried on under many different systems. It was 
 during 1851, the year of the first Great Exhibition, 
 that she was thus fitting herself practically for the 
 great task that lay before her in the not very distant 
 future. 
 u
 
 1 8 The World's Workers. 
 
 On her return to England, Miss Nightingale found 
 a patient that required all her time and help of 
 every kind. This patient was none other than the 
 Sanatorium in Harley Street for gentlewomen of limited 
 means. Into the saving of this valuable institution 
 Miss Nightingale threw all her energy, and for two or 
 three years, hidden away from the outside world, she 
 was working day and night for her poor suffering 
 ladies, until at length she was able to feel that the 
 Sanatorium was not only in good health but on the 
 high road to permanent success. 
 
 Florence Nightingale's own health, however, gave 
 way under the long-continued strain of anxiety and 
 fatigue ; she was obliged to leave the invalids for 
 whom she had done so much, and go home for the 
 rest and change she so sorely needed. 
 
 Now, while Miss Nightingale had been quietly 
 getting " Harley Street " into working order, the 
 gravest and most terrible changes had taken 
 place in the affairs of the nation, and not only in 
 those of England, but in those of the whole of 
 Europe. 
 
 In 185 1, when the first Great Exhibition was opened, 
 all was peace — the long peace of forty years was still 
 unbroken, people said it never was to be broken again, 
 and that wars and rumours of wars had come to an end. 
 So much for human foreknowledge. By the autumn 
 of 1854, the horrors of the Crimean war had reached 
 their climax. The Times was full, day by day, of the
 
 Florence Nightingale. 19 
 
 most thrilling and appalling descriptions of the hideous 
 sufferings of our brave men, sufferings caused quite as 
 much by the utter breakdown of the sanitary ad- 
 ministration as by even the deadly battles and trench- 
 work ; while every post was bringing agonising 
 private letters appealing for help. 
 
 Men were wounded in the Crimea, the hospitals 
 were far off at Scutari, the wide and stormy Black 
 Sea had to be crossed to reach them ; the stores of 
 food, clothing, and medicine that might have saved 
 many a life were at Varna, or lost in the Black 
 Prince; the state of the great Barrack Hospital at 
 Scutari was indescribably horrible ; everybody was 
 frantic to rush to the relief; no one knew what best 
 to do ; public feeling was at fever-heat. How could 
 it be otherwise when William Howard Russell, the 
 Times correspondent, was constantly writing such true 
 but heartrending letters as this ? — 
 
 "The commonest accessories of a hospital are 
 wanting ; there is not the least attention paid to 
 decency or cleanliness ; the stench is appalling ; the 
 foetid air can barely struggle out to taint the atmo- 
 sphere, save through the chinks in the walls and roofs ; 
 and, for all I can observe^ these men die without the 
 least effort being made to save them. There they lie, 
 just as they were let gently down on the ground by 
 the poor fellows, their comrades, who brought them 
 on their backs from the camp with the greatest tender- 
 ness, but who are not allowed to remain with them.
 
 20 The World's Workers. 
 
 The sick appear to be tended by the sick, and the 
 dying by the dying." 
 
 Miss Nightingale, who was then recovering from 
 her Harley Street nursing, deeply felt the intensity of 
 the crisis that was moving the whole nation ; but, 
 whereas the panic had driven most of the kind people 
 who were so eager to help the army nearly " off their 
 heads," it only made hers the cooler and clearer. She 
 wrote offering her services to Mr. Sidney Herbert, 
 afterwards Lord Herbert, the Minister for War, who, 
 together with his wife, had long known her, and had 
 recognised her wonderful organising faculties, and her 
 great practical experience. 
 
 It was on the 15th of October that she wrote to 
 Mr. Herbert. On the very same day the Minister 
 had written to her. Their letters crossed. Mr. 
 Herbert, who had himself given much attention to 
 military hospitals, laid before Miss Nightingale^ in his 
 now historical letter, a plan for nursing the sick and 
 wounded at Scutari. 
 
 " There is, as far as I know," he wrote, " only one 
 person in England capable of organising and directing 
 such a plan, and I have been several times on the 
 point of asking you if you would be disposed to make 
 the attempt. That it will be difficult to form a corps 
 of nurses, no one knows better than yourself" 
 
 After specifying the difficulty in finding not only 
 good nurses, but good nurses who ivoiild be willing to 
 submit to authority, he goes on, " I have this simple
 
 FloreiXce Nightingale. 21 
 
 question to put to you. Could you go out yourself and 
 take charge of everything ? It is, of course, understood 
 that you will have absolute authority over all the 
 nurses, unlimited power to draw on the Government 
 for all you judge necessary to the success of your 
 mission ; and I think I may assure you of the co- 
 operation of the medical staff. Your personal qualities, 
 your knowledge, and your authority in administrative 
 affairs all fit you for this position." 
 
 Miss Nightingale at once concurred in Mr. 
 Herbert's proposal. The materials for a staff of 
 good nurses did not exist, and she had to put up 
 with the best that could be gathered on such short 
 notice. 
 
 On the 2 1st, a letter by Mr. Herbert from the 
 War Office told the world that " Miss Nightingale, 
 accompanied by thirty-four nurses, will leave this 
 evening. Miss Nightingale, who has, I believe, greater 
 practical experience of hospital administration and 
 treatment than any other lady in this country, has, 
 with a self-devotion for which I have no words to 
 express my gratitude, undertaken this noble but 
 arduous work." 
 
 A couple of days later there was a paragraph in 
 the Times from Miss Nightingale herself, referring to 
 the gifts for the soldiers that had been offered so 
 lavishly : " Miss Nightingale neither invites nor 
 refuses the generous offers. Her banking account is 
 open at Messrs. Coutts'." On the 30th of October,
 
 22 The World's Workers. 
 
 the Times republished from the Examiner a letter, 
 headed "Who is Miss Nightingale?" and signed 
 " One who has known her." Then was made known to 
 the British public for the first time who the woman 
 that had gone to the aid of the sick and wounded 
 really was ; then it was shown that she was no 
 hospital matron, but a young and singularly grace- 
 ful and accomplished gentlewoman of wealth and 
 position, who had, not in a moment of national 
 enthusiasm, but as the set purpose of her life from 
 girlhood up, devoted herself to the studying of 
 God's great and good laws of health, and to trying 
 to apply them to the help of her suffering fellow- 
 creatures. 
 
 From that 30th of October, 1854, the heroine of 
 the Crimean war was Florence Nightingale, and the 
 heroine of that war will she be while the English 
 tongue exists, and English history is read. The 
 national enthusiasm for her was at once intense; 
 and it grew deeper and more intense as week by 
 week revealed her powers. " Less talent and energy 
 of character, less singleness of purpose and devo- 
 tion, could never have combined the heterogeneous 
 elements which she gathered together in one common 
 work and labour of love." 
 
 I met, the other day, a lady who saw something 
 of Miss Nightingale just before she went out to the 
 East. This lady tells me that Miss Nightingale was 
 then most graceful in appearance, tall and slight,
 
 Florexce Nightingale. 23 
 
 very quiet and still. At first sight her earnest face 
 struck one as cold ; but when she began to speak 
 she grew very animated, and her dark eyes shone out 
 with a peculiarly star-like brightness. 
 
 This was the woman whose starting for the East 
 was at once felt to be the beginning of better things ; 
 but so prejudiced were many good English people 
 against women-nurses for soldiers that Mrs. Jameson, 
 writing at the time, calls the scheme " an under- 
 taking wholly new to our English customs, much 
 at variance with the usual education given to women 
 in this country.'^ She, sensible woman, one in ad- 
 vance of her day, hoped it would succeed, but hoped 
 rather faintly. "If it succeeds," she goes on, "it 
 will be the true, the lasting glory of Florence Nightin- 
 gale, and her band of devoted assistants, that they 
 have broken down a ' Chinese wall of prejudices,' 
 religious, social, professional, and have established a 
 precedent which will, indeed, multiply the good to all 
 time." 
 
 The little band of nurses crossed the channel to 
 Boulogne, where they found the fisherwomen eager 
 for the honour of carrying their luggage to the 
 railway. This display, however, seemed to Miss 
 Nightingale to be so out of keeping with the 
 deep gravity of her mission, that, at her wish, it 
 was not repeated at any of the stopping-places 
 during the route. The Vectis took the nurses 
 across the Mediterranean, and a terribly rough
 
 24 The World's Workers. 
 
 passage they had. On Nov. 5th, the very day on 
 which the battle of Inkermann was fought, the ship 
 arrived at Scutari. 
 
 Miss Nightingale and her nurses landed during the 
 afternoon, and it was remarked at the time that their 
 neat black dresses formed a strong contrast to those of 
 the usual hospital attendants. A large number of 
 men, wounded at Balaclava, had been landed the day 
 before. 
 
 The great Barrack Hospital at Scutari, which had 
 been lent to the British by the Turkish Government, 
 was an enormous quadrangular building, a quarter of 
 a mile each way, with square towers at each angle. 
 It stood on the Asiatic shore a hundred feet above 
 the Bosphorus. Another large hospital stood near ; 
 the whole, at times, containing as many as four 
 thousand men. The whole were placed under Miss 
 Nightingale's care. The nurses were lodged in the 
 south-east tower. 
 
 The extent of corridors in the great hospital, 
 storey above storey, in which the sick and wounded 
 were at first laid on wretched palliasses as close to- 
 gether as they could be placed, made her inspection and 
 care most difficult. There were two rows of mattresses 
 in the corridors, where two persons could hardly pass 
 abreast between foot and foot. The mortality, when 
 the Times first took up the cause of the sick and 
 wounded, was enormous. 
 
 In the Crimea itself there was not half the mor-
 
 Florence Nightingale, 25 
 
 tality in the tents, horrible as were the sufferings and 
 privations of the men there. 
 
 " The whole of yesterday," writes one of the nurses 
 a few days after they had arrived, " one could only 
 forget one's own existence, for it was spent, first in 
 sewing the men's mattresses together, and then in 
 washing them and assisting the surgeons, when we 
 could, in dressing their ghastly wounds after their five 
 days' confinement on board ship, during which space 
 their wounds had not been dressed. Hundreds of 
 men with fever, dysentery, and cholera (the wounded 
 were the smaller portion) filled the wards in succession, 
 from the overcrowded transports." 
 
 Miss Nightingale's position was a most difficult 
 one. Everything was in disorder, and every official 
 was extremely jealous of interference. Miss Night- 
 ingale, however, at once impressed upon her staff 
 the duty of obeying the doctors' orders, as she did 
 herself An invalid's kitchen was established imme- 
 diately by her to supplement the rations. A laundry 
 was added ; the nursing itself was, however, the most 
 difficult and important part of the work. 
 
 But it would take far too much space to give all 
 the details of that kind but strict administration which 
 brought comparative comfort and a low death-rate 
 into the Scutari hospitals. During a year and a-half 
 the labour of getting the hospitals into working order 
 was enormous, but before the Peace arrived they were 
 models of what such institutions may be.
 
 26 The World's Workers. 
 
 Speaking of Miss Nightingale in the Hospital at 
 Scutari, the Times correspondent wrote : " Wherever 
 there is disease in its most dangerous form, and the 
 hand of the spoiler distressingly nigh, there is that 
 incomparable woman sure to be seen ; her benignant 
 presence is an influence for good comfort even amid 
 the struggles of expiring nature. She is a ' minister- 
 ing angel,' without any exaggeration, in these hos- 
 pitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along 
 each corridor, every poor fellow's face softens with 
 gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical 
 officers have retired for the night, and silence and 
 darkness have settled down upon these miles of 
 prostrate sick, she may be observed, alone, with a 
 little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds. 
 With the heart of a true woman and the manner of a 
 lady, accomplished and refined beyond most of her 
 sex, she combines a surprising calmness of judgment 
 and promptitude and decision of character. The 
 popular instinct was not mistaken, which, when she 
 set out from England on her mission of mercy, hailed 
 her as a heroine ; I trust that she may not earn her 
 title to a higher, though sadder, appellation. No one 
 who has observed her fragile figure and delicate health 
 can avoid misgivings lest these should fail." 
 
 Public feeling bubbled up into poetry. Even 
 doggrel ballads sung about the streets praised 
 
 "The Nightingale of the East, 
 For her heart it means good."
 
 Florence Nightingale, 27 
 
 Among many others, the American poet, Long- 
 fellow, wrote the charming poem. The Lady zvitJi the 
 Lamp^ so beautifully illustrated by the statuette of 
 Florence Nightingale at St. Thomas's Hospital, sug- 
 gested by the well-known incident recorded in a 
 soldier's letter : 
 
 " She would speak to one and another, and nod 
 and smile to many more ; but she could not do it 
 to all, you know, for we lay there by hundreds ; but 
 we could kiss her shadow as it fell, and lay our heads 
 on our pillows again content." 
 
 " Lo ! in that house of misery 
 A lady with a lamp I see 
 
 Pass through the ghmmering gloom, 
 And flit from room to room. 
 
 " And slow, as in a dream of bliss, 
 The speechless sufferer turns to kiss 
 Her shadow as it falls 
 Upon the darkening walls. 
 
 " On England's annals, through the long 
 Hereafter of her speech and song, 
 A light its rays shall cast 
 From portals of the past. 
 
 '* A lady with a lamp shall stand 
 In the great history of the land, 
 A noble type of good. 
 Heroic womanhood." 
 
 In the following spring Miss Nightingale crossed 
 the Black Sea and visited Balaclava, where the state
 
 2S The World's Workers. 
 
 of the hospitals in huts was extremely distressing, as 
 help of all kinds was even more difficult to obtain 
 there than at Scutari. Here Miss Nightingale spent 
 some weeks, until she was prostrated by a severe 
 attack of the Crimean fever, of which she very nearly 
 died. 
 
 The characteristic little extract following will show 
 at once her power of observation, and how readily 
 she turns every scrap of personal experience to ad- 
 vantage for other sufferers : 
 
 " I have seen in fevers (and felt when I was a fever 
 patient myself in the Crimea) the most acute suffering 
 produced from the patient (in a hut) not being able 
 to see out of window, and the knots in the wood being 
 the only view, I shall never forget the rapture of 
 fever patients over a bunch of bright-coloured flowers. 
 I remember (in my own case) a nosegay of wild 
 flowers being sent me, and from that moment recovery 
 becoming more rapid." 
 
 But at length the Crimean War came to an end. 
 The nation was prepared to welcome its heroine with 
 the most passionate enthusiasm. But Florence 
 Nightingale quietly slipped back unnoticed to her 
 Derbyshire home, without its being known that she 
 had passed through London. 
 
 Worn out with ill-health and fatigue, and naturally 
 shrinking from publicity,the public at large has scarcely 
 ever seen her ; she has been a great invalid ever since 
 the war, and for many years hardly ever left her house.
 
 Florence Nightingale. 29 
 
 But her energy has been untiring. She was one of 
 the founders of the Red Cross Society for the rcHef of 
 the sick and wounded in war. When the Civil War 
 broke out in America she was consulted as to all 
 the details of the military nursing there. " Her name 
 is almost more known amongst us than even in 
 Europe," wrote an American. During the Franco- 
 German War she gave advice for the chief hospitals 
 under the Crown Princess, the Princess Alice, and 
 others. The Children's Hospital at Lisbon was erected 
 from her plans. The hospitals in Australia, India, and 
 other places, have received her care. A large propor- 
 tion of the plans for the building and organisation of 
 the hospitals erected during the last twenty-five years 
 in England have passed through her hands. 
 
 The Queen, who had followed her work with 
 constant interest, presented her with a beautiful and 
 costly decoration. The nation gave iJ"50,ooo to found 
 the Nightingale Home. 
 
 In this home Miss Nightingale takes the deepest 
 interest, constantly having the nurses and sisters to 
 visit her, and learning from them the most minute 
 details of its working. Great is evidently her rejoic- 
 ing when one of her " Nightingales " proves to be a 
 really fine nurse, such a one, for instance, as Agnes 
 Jones, the reformer of workhouse nursing. 
 
 When Agnes Jones died in 1868, Miss Nightingale 
 broke through her retirement in an article in a monthly 
 magazine, called " Una and her Lions," a sketch,
 
 30 The World's Workers. 
 
 indeed, of her friend's taming the paupers, but far more 
 is it a portrait of Florence Nightingale by herself. 
 This article now forms the introduction of the well- 
 known memorials of Agnes Jones. It is a noble 
 tribute from one great worker to another. It throws 
 so much light on the true character of Florence Night- 
 ingale herself ; it brings you closely into contact 
 with her own heart and brain, that you feel as you 
 read it she must be writing her own experience. A 
 true portrait of herself by herself comes out when 
 we look at that record as a whole. You see 
 how Florence Nightingale herself had to fight, first 
 against the people who thought nursing as a pro- 
 fession unfit for decent women, then with those 
 who admitted it might be followed by " the lower 
 middle-class,^' and lastly with those who considered 
 it a natural gift, for which no training at all was 
 necessary. 
 
 Just notice the strong terseness, the business-like 
 pointedness, as well as the beautiful earnestness, both 
 religious and artistic, of the following. After telling 
 us of the wonders wrought by Una on her paupers, 
 more hard to tame than lions, she goes on : " In 
 less than three years she did this. And how did 
 she do all this } " 
 
 "Agnes had trained herself to the utmost ; she was 
 always training herself; for nursing is no holiday work. 
 Nursing is an art ; and, if it is to be made an art, 
 requires as exclusive a devotion, as hard a preparation.
 
 Florence Nightingale. 31 
 
 as any painter's or sculptor's work ; for what is the 
 having to do with dead canvas or cold marble 
 compared with having to do with the living body, 
 the temple of God's Spirit ? Nursing is one of the 
 Fine Arts ; I had almost said, the finest of the Fine 
 Arts." ^^. ■.-.... ''*••*'*■' 
 
 " Fid-fadding " was one of the besetting sins 
 of most women in the days when Florence Nightin- 
 gale was young. It was certainly one of the sins 
 most abhorrent to her energetic nature. " How can 
 any undervalue business habits ? As if anything 
 could be done without them ! " she exclaims. 
 
 This was the high position Florence Nightingale 
 conquered for her fellow-women. Hundreds have 
 occupied, and are still occupying, the ground she 
 won for them. " And I give a quarter of a century's 
 European experience," she goes on, " when I say that 
 the happiest people, the fondest of their occupation, 
 the most thankful for their lives, are in my opinion 
 those engaged in sick nursing." 
 
 I will quote no more, but if you really want 
 to know Florence Nightingale, read the Introduction 
 to "Agnes Jones," which shows that Miss Nightingale 
 has as great a power of administrating pen and ink 
 as hospitals. Her invalid life since the war has 
 been full of business ; the amount of work of all 
 kinds, at home and abroad, she has done since 
 the war is enormous. " Notes on Nursing," an in- 
 valuable book which the Medical Times declared no
 
 32 The World's Workers. 
 
 one else could have written, has entirely conquered 
 the bad old ideas, and has shown what an art and 
 science nursing can become ; better stilly it has " vindi- 
 cated the ways of God with man." " Notes on 
 Hospitals," less well known to the general public, 
 contains a perfect mine of information, the gist 
 of which she has reduced, in a most marvellous 
 appendix, under five simple headings. A few 
 remarks from the preface of the third edition will 
 show with what patient care she had thought out the 
 subject. 
 
 " It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as 
 the very first requirement in a hospital, that it should 
 do the sick no harm. It is quite necessary, neverthe- 
 less, to lay down such a principle, because the actual 
 mortality in hospitals, especially in those of large 
 crowded cities, is very much higher than any calcula- 
 tion founded on the mortality of the same class of 
 diseases among patients treated out of hospital would 
 lead us to expect. TJie knoivledge of this fact first 
 induced me to examijie into the influence exercised by 
 hospital co7istruction 07i the duration and death-rate of 
 cases received into the wards." 
 
 Officials in high places, ever since the Crimean 
 War, have sent Miss Nightingale piles, mountains, 
 one might say, of Reports and Blue Books for her 
 advice. She seems to be able to condense any 
 number of them into half-a-dozen telling sentences ; 
 for instance, the mortality in Indian regiments during
 
 Florence Nightingale. 33 
 
 times of peace became exceedingly alarming. Reports 
 on the subject were poured in upon her. 
 
 " The men are simply treated like Strasbourg 
 geese," she said in effect. " They eat, sleep, frizzle in 
 the sun, and eat and sleep again. Treat them reason- 
 ably, and they will be well." 
 
 She has written much valuable advice on " How 
 to live and not die in India." 
 
 Children's Hospitals have also engaged much of 
 her attention. You cannot open one of her books 
 at hazard without being struck with some shrewd 
 remark that tells how far-reaching is her observation ; 
 as in this, on the playgrounds of Children's Hos- 
 pitals : " A large garden-ground, laid out in sward 
 and grass hillocks, and such ways as children like 
 (not too pretty, or the children will be scolded for 
 spoiling it) must be provided." 
 
 Here, I am sorry to find, my space comes to an 
 endj but not, I hope, before I have been able to sketch 
 in some slight way what great results will assuredly 
 follow when Faith and Science are united in one 
 person. In the days which we may hope are now 
 dawning, when these gifts will be united, not 
 in an individual here and there, but in a large 
 portion of our race, there will doubtless be many a 
 devoted woman whose knowledge may equal her 
 practical skill and her love for God and her fellow- 
 creatures, who will understand, even more thoroughly 
 than most of us now can (most of us being still so
 
 34 The JVoa'LDs Woukers. 
 
 ignorant), how deep a debt of gratitude is due to her 
 who first opened for women so many paths of duty, 
 and raised nursing from a menial employment to the 
 dignity of an "Art of Charity" — to England's first 
 great nurse, the wise, beloved, and far-seeing heroine 
 of the Crimean War, the Lady of the Lamp, Florence 
 Nightingale.
 
 FRANCES RIDLEY IIAVERGAL. 
 
 THE story of Frances Ridley Havergal's life is 
 the history of the growth of love to Christ 
 in her own soul. In the simple records of herself and 
 her nearest relatives this growth has been so clearly 
 placed before us that we are able to trace it from its 
 first stirrings in her childish heart right up to the 
 moment when, her dying face lighted with heavenly 
 radiance, her earthly voice failed for ever as she saw 
 her King in His beauty in the land 
 
 "Where all His sinscers meet." 
 
 &^ 
 
 To Frances Ridley Havergal was given not only to 
 feel in a most wonderful degree that ecstatic love to 
 Christ and entire consecration to Him, which are such 
 marked and blessed characteristics of much of the 
 Christian life of the present day, but an almost 
 unique power of so expressing that love that where- 
 ever an English book can be read, there hearts have 
 felt the glow of her devotion. In her case tlie love 
 came slowly, and so did the power of pouring it out. 
 Her alabaster box of precious ointment was long in
 
 36 The World's Workers. 
 
 filling ; but when it was filled, with what rapture did 
 she break it at the blessed feet of her King ! 
 
 Frances Ridley Havergal was born at the end 
 of the year 1836. She was the sixth and youngest 
 child of the Rev. Henry Havergal and of Jane his 
 wife. Her father was at that time Rector of Astley, 
 Worcestershire. He and his wife were both very 
 earnest, spiritually-minded, evangelical Christians; 
 and their home was rich in all holy influences, in much 
 beauty, and in a delightful musicalness. Mr. Havergal 
 was, indeed, " a living song," filling the house with 
 holy melodies, and his wife a most lovely woman. 
 The last baby, Frances, shared the happy fate of most 
 last babies ; she was the special pet of the family, 
 and seems to have been designed by nature for that 
 position. At two years old she was a very fairy-like 
 creature, with light curling hair, bright expression, 
 and a most fair complexion. A prettier child, writes 
 her elder sister, Miriam, was seldom seen. Much of 
 this sunny fairness and brightness she kept through- 
 out her life. 
 
 At two years of age she could speak with perfect 
 distinctness. This easy command of language grew 
 with her growth, and is very noticeable in her books. 
 Like all other young children, she liked to have 
 stories told her, and was very fond of animals, 
 especially of a certain Flora or Flo, a beautiful 
 white-and-tan spaniel, who was her great friend 
 and companion. This love of animals never left
 
 Frances Ridley Havekgal. 37 
 
 her. Many years afterwards she wrote : " Guess my 
 birthday treat ? To the Zoological Gardens. I don't 
 know anything I would rather see in London." 
 
 At a very early age Frances picked up a good bit 
 of knowledge without much trouble to herself. At 
 morning prayers she always sat on her father's knee 
 whilst he read the Scriptures, and from him she 
 learned to sing hymns very sweetly. When she was 
 three she could read easy books, and was often found 
 hidden under a table with some engrossing story. 
 
 On her third birthday she was crowned with a 
 wreath of pink China roses, which Miriam made for 
 her, and on her fourth birthday she was brought down 
 to dessert garlanded with bay leaves ; and a most 
 lovely little picture she made, with her exquisite 
 fairness, and her bright sparkling eyes full of merri- 
 ment. At four Frances could read the Bible, but 
 great care was always taken not to tire her, or to 
 excite the precocity of her mind. 
 
 The little maiden was, however, so fond of 
 learning that she could not be kept from it. For 
 instance, while the others were having their German 
 lesson, she would take care to be in the room, and 
 without any one's knowing that she was listening, 
 picked up so much that the master begged to be 
 allowed to teach her. 
 
 Rhymes came naturally to her. Her father was a 
 great composer of hymn tunes and sacred poetry, 
 and music filled the atmosphere in which she lived.
 
 3$ The Worlds Workers. 
 
 At that early age she had a Httle book in which 
 she did a great deal of scribbling, mostly in rh)-me. 
 Her sister Miriam married, and when Frances was 
 promoted to the dignity of aunt she wrote a copy- 
 book full of simple tales for her little niece. 
 
 From, nine years old she wrote long and amusing 
 letters to her brother Frank and her young friends. 
 In fact, it seems she took to her pen quite naturally ; 
 and writing, in those early days, does not seem to 
 have been any trouble to her. Indeed, to those 
 who saw only her outward life, Frances, in her early 
 childhood, was a very merry little girl, much given to 
 sitting up in trees and climbing walls ; though the poor 
 child had one very great trouble in her heart, which 
 she carefully hid away even from the most loving 
 eyes. 
 
 Perhaps we should have known nothing about this 
 trouble, which was very heavy and very great, if she 
 had not left us an account of it. When she was 
 twenty-two years of age she wrote a little auto- 
 biography of her own inner life, which you will see 
 was far from being as bright as her outer one. How 
 many a girl, or woman, when she reads, as hundreds 
 of thousands have done, that simple but deeply 
 thoughtful unveiling of a girl's inner life, must have 
 exclaimed with wonder: "Ah! that is just what I 
 am feeling ! " or, " So I felt when I was young ! " 
 
 The great trouble and sorrow of her young life 
 were that she felt she ought to love God, but that she
 
 Franc f.s Ridley Havf.rgal. 39 
 
 did not. " Ui) to the time I was six years old," she 
 writes, "I have no remembrance of any rch'glous ideas 
 whatever ; I do not think I could ever have said any 
 of those 'pretty things' that little children often do, 
 though there were sweet and beloved and holy ones 
 round me who must have often tried to put good 
 thoughts into my little mind. But from six to eight 
 I recall a different state of things. The beginning 
 of it was a sermon at Hallow. Of this I even now 
 retain a distinct impression. It was to me a very 
 terrible one, dwelling much on hell and judgment, 
 and what a fearful thing it is to fall into the hands of 
 the living God. This sermon haunted me. I began 
 to pray a good deal, though only night and morning, 
 with a sort of fidget and impatience, almost angry at 
 feeling so unhappy, and wanting and expecting a new 
 heart, and to have everything put straight and be 
 made happy all at once. 
 
 " This sort of thing went on at intervals, for often 
 a month or two would pass without a serious thought 
 or a true prayer. At such times I utterly abominated 
 being 'talked to,' and would do anything on earth to 
 get away. Any cut or bruise (and such were more 
 the rule than exception in those wild days of tree- 
 climbing, wall-scaling, etc.) was a reason why I could 
 
 not possibly kneel down when dear M offered 
 
 prayer for me. Then after a time of this sort, some 
 mere trifle, a calm, beautiful evening, or a ' Sunday 
 book ' would rouse me up to uncomfortableness again.
 
 40 The World's Workers. 
 
 One sort of habit I got into in a steady way ; every 
 
 Sunday afternoon I went alone into a little front room 
 
 over the hall and read a chapter in the Testament, 
 
 and then knelt down and prayed for a few minutes, 
 
 after which I usually felt soothed and less naughty. 
 
 Once when Marian P was my only little 
 
 visitor, I did not like any omissions, and so took 
 
 her with me, saying a few words of prayer 'out 
 
 of my head ' without any embarrassment at her 
 
 presence. 
 
 " I had a far niore vivid sense of the beauty of 
 
 Nature as a little child than I have even now. I have 
 
 hardly felt anything so intensely since, in the way of 
 
 a sort of unbearable enjoyment. The golden quiet of 
 
 a bright summer's day used to enter into me and do 
 
 me good. What only some great and rare musical 
 
 enjoyment is to me now, the shade of a tree under a 
 
 clear blue sky, with a sunbeam glancing through the 
 
 boughs, was to me then. But I did not feel happy 
 
 in my very enjoyment ; I wanted more. I do not 
 
 think I was eight when I hit upon Cowper's lines, 
 
 ending : 
 
 ' M}'^ Father made them all ! ' 
 
 That was what I wanted to be able to say ; and, after 
 once seeing the words, I never saw a lovely scene 
 again without being teased by them. 
 
 " One spring (I think 1845) I kept thinking of them, 
 and a dozen times a day said to myself, ' Oh, if God 
 would but make me a Christian before the summer
 
 F/iANCEs Ridley Haver gal. 41 
 
 comes,' because I longed so to enjoy His works as I 
 felt they could be enjoyed. 
 
 " All this wliile I don't think any one could have 
 given the remotest guess of what was passing in my 
 mind. I knezij I was a ' naughty child ' ; in fact, I 
 almost enjoyed my naughtiness in a savage, desperate 
 kind of way, despairing of getting better, except by 
 being made a Christian." 
 
 In her latest little book, " Kept for the Master's 
 Use," published after her death, she tells us how, at 
 this time, she longed for some one (who did not 
 belong to her own family, to whom she would not 
 listen, good and holy though she knew them to be) to 
 tell her about Christ. She says good men used to 
 come and preach beautiful sermons in her father's 
 church, but when they went home with them they 
 talked of all sorts of other things, " and I did so wish 
 they would talk about the Saviour whom I wanted, 
 but had not found. It would have been so much 
 more interesting to me, and oh ! why didn't they ever 
 talk to me about Him, instead of about my lessons 
 or their little girls at home } They did not know how 
 a hungry little soul went empty away," 
 
 When she was about nine, Frances left the large 
 Henwick garden, where she had played with her dear 
 dog Flora, for the town rectory of St. Nicholas. Her 
 father called her in those days " a caged lark," 
 " There," she writes, " I had a tiny room of my own ; 
 its little window was my ' country,' and soon the sky
 
 42 Tiip. World's Workers. 
 
 and the clouds were the same sort of relations to my 
 spirit that trees and flowers had been. 
 
 " Soon a sermon by the curate, on ' Fear not, little 
 flock,' struck me very much. I did so want to be 
 happy and a ' Christian.' I had never yet spoken to 
 any mortal about religion ; but now I was so uneasy, 
 that after nearly a fortnight's hesitation, being alone 
 with the curate one evening, when almost dark, I told 
 him my trouble, saying I thought I was getting worse. 
 He said moving and coming to new scenes was the 
 cause, most likely, of my feeling worse, and that it 
 would soon go off ; I was to try to be a good child 
 and pray, etc., etc. So after that my lips were utterly 
 sealed to all but God for five years." 
 
 When Frances was eleven the most terrible sorrow 
 a child can know fell upon her. 
 
 After long suffering, her mother died. 
 
 The poor child's grief was intense, for she had 
 clung wildly to hope until the very last, and even after 
 her mother had passed away she had still tried to 
 believe that she was but in a trance. " And so," she 
 tells us herself, "when no one was near she had gone 
 again and again into that room and drawn the curtain 
 aside, half expecting to see the dear eyes unclose, and 
 to feel the cold cheek warm again to her kiss." 
 
 She has left a touching word- picture of herself, 
 standing by the window in a front room, looking 
 through a little space between the window and blind. 
 All the shops were shut up, though it was not Sunday.
 
 Frances Ridley Havrrgal. 43 
 
 She knew it would be dreadful to look out of lliat 
 window, and yet she felt she must look. She did not 
 cry, she only stood and shivered in the warm air. 
 Very slowly and quietly a funeral passed out of the 
 rectory gate, and in another minute was out of sight 
 turning into the church. Then she stood no longer, 
 but rushed away to her own little room, and flung 
 herself on her little bed, and cried : " Oh, mamma ! 
 mamma! mamma!" It seemed as if there were 
 nothing else in her little heart but that one word. 
 All the strange hope of the past week was gone ; she 
 knew that she was motherless. 
 
 But though her grief was very deep, she ever tried 
 to conceal it ; nor, indeed, was it always heavy upon 
 her, for she had the happy faculty, common to most 
 children {or, poor wee things, how could they live at 
 all through a great sorrow !) of forgetting everything 
 else for the moment when some new interest occupied 
 her attention. " Thus," she writes, " a merry laugh or 
 a sudden light-heeled scamper led others to think I 
 had not many sad thoughts, whereas not a minute 
 before my little heart was heavy and sad." 
 
 After her mother's death she was often a good deal 
 with her eldest sister, Miriam, at Oakhampton, where 
 she is remembered as a clever, amusing child, some- 
 times a little wilful and troublesome from mere excess 
 of animal spirits, but always affectionate and grateful 
 for any I'ttle treat ; much given to reading poetry, 
 and not so tidy as she afterwards became, for she used
 
 44 ItiE World's Workers. 
 
 to leave books about in the hay-loft, manger, and all 
 sorts of garden nooks. 
 
 But all this while the little girl still carried about 
 with her, wherever she went, that burden of hidden 
 trouble she had borne so long, " I know," the 
 autobiography goes on, "I did not love God ; the very 
 thought of Him frightened me." She would try to 
 force herself to think about God, hard as it was to do 
 so. Going to bed, she would begin, " How good it 
 was of God to send Jesus to die," while she by no 
 means felt or believed that wonderful goodness. No 
 one had written " Little Pillows " in those days, nor 
 had rung for children " Morning Bells." 
 
 " Between thirteen and fourteen," Frances writes, 
 "a soberising thoughtful time seemed to fall on me 
 like a mantle, and my strivings were no longer the 
 passionate spasmodic meteor flashes they had been, 
 but something deeper, more settled, more sorrowful. 
 All this was secret, and only within my own breast ; 
 very few knew me to be anything but a careless, merry 
 girl, light-hearted in the extreme. Now came a more 
 definite and earnest prayer, iox faith. Oh, to believe 
 in Jesus, to believe that He had pardoned me ! I used 
 to lie awake in the long summer twilight praying for 
 this precious gift. I read a great deal of the Bible in 
 a ' straight on ' sort of way. Once I determined, if 
 eternal life were in the Scriptures, find it I would, and 
 resolved to begin giving an hour a day to very careful 
 and prayerful reading of the New Testament.
 
 FnANCES Ridley Havergal. 45 
 
 "August 15th, 1850, to my great delight, I was 
 sent to school. The night before I went, Ellen, clear, 
 gentle, heavenly sister, stood by me brushing my hair. 
 She spoke of God's love. I could not stand it, and 
 for the first time for five years I spoke out ; ' I can't 
 love God yet, Nellie,' was all I said, but I felt a great 
 deal more. Mrs. Teed, the principal of the school, 
 had a sweet and holy power. She prayed and spoke 
 with us with a fervour I have never seen equalled. 
 There were many Christian girls. I envied them. 
 Mary was one. I longed to tell her how unhappy I 
 was. At last I did. The simple, loving words of my 
 little Heaven-taught schoolfellow brought dewy 
 refreshment to my soul as she said, in French (we 
 always had to speak French) : Jesus said, ' Suffer 
 the little children,' etc. It is every little child who 
 ought to come to Him, every little child whom He 
 calls, every little child whom He embraces. 
 
 " After this I had many talks with Mary, but with 
 no one else. To Diana, the goddess among my school 
 friends, and whom I believed to be like Mary, not a 
 word could I speak ; though I longed to hear her 
 speak to me as Mary did. 
 
 " I drank in every word I heard about Jesus and 
 His salvation. I came to see that it was Christ aloie 
 that could satisfy me. I wept and prayed day and 
 night ; but ' there was no voice nor any that 
 answered.' I shall never forget the evening of Sun- 
 day, December 8th. Diana, whom I loved with a
 
 46 The World's Workers. 
 
 perfectly idolatrous affection, had hardly seen me all 
 day. For some time I had noticed a slight depression 
 about her. That evening, as I sat nearly opposite to 
 her at tea, I could not help seeing (nobody could) 
 a new and remarkable radiance about her counte- 
 nance. It seemed literally lighted up from within ; 
 while her voice, even in the commonest remarks, 
 sounded like a song of gladness. I looked at her 
 almost with awe. As soon as tea was over she came 
 round to my side of the table, sat down by me on the 
 form, threw her arm around me and said : ' Oh 
 Fanny, dearest Fanny, the blessing has come to me 
 at last. Jesus has forgiven me, I know. He is my 
 Saviour, and I am so happy ! Only come to Him and 
 He will receive you. Even now He loves you, though 
 you don't know it.' 
 
 " Having broken the ice at Belmont (my school), 
 it was the less difficult to do so again ; and before 
 long I had a confidante in Miss Cooke, who after- 
 wards became my loved mother. We were visiting at 
 the same time at Oakhampton, and had several 
 conversations, each of which left me more earnest and 
 hopeful. At last, one evening in the twilight, I sat 
 on the drawing-room sofa alone with her. I told her 
 how I longed to know I was forgiven ; how even my 
 precious papa, brothers and sisters, all I loved were 
 nothing in comparison. She paused, and then said 
 slowly : * Then, Fanny, I think, I am sure it will not 
 be very long before your desire is granted, >-our hope
 
 Frances Ridley Havergal. 47 
 
 fulfilled.' After a ^qw more words, she said : ' Why 
 cannot you trust yourself to your Saviour at once ? 
 Supposing now, at this moment, Christ were to come, 
 could you not trust Him? Would not His call. His 
 promise, be enough for you ? Could you not commit 
 your soul to him, to your Saviour, Jesus ? ' 
 
 "Then came a flash of hope across me, which made 
 me feel literally breathless. I remember how my 
 heart beat. ' I could, surely,' was my response ; and 
 I left her suddenly and ran away upstairs to think it 
 out. I flung myself on my knees in my room, and 
 strove to realise the sudden hope. I was very happy 
 at last ; I could commit my soul to Jesus. I could 
 trust Him with my all for eternity. It was so utterly 
 new to have any bright thoughts about religion that 
 I could hardly believe that it could be so. 
 
 " Then and there I committed my soul to the 
 Saviour; I do not mean to say without any trembling 
 or fear, but I did ; and earth and heaven seemed 
 bright from that moment ; / did trust the Lord 
 Jesus. 
 
 "For ihe first time my Bible was siceet to me, and 
 the first passage I distinctly remember reading, in a 
 new and glad light, was the fourteenth and following 
 chapters of St. John's Gospel." 
 
 This was in February, 185 1, when Frances Haver- 
 gal was- fourteen. With this new glad light there 
 came to her a great eagerness for study. She threw 
 herself into her lessons with intense enjo}-nicnt until
 
 48 The World's Workers. 
 
 December came, when a severe attack of erj'sipelas in 
 her face and head put a stop to the work she loved 
 only too well. She was at once taken home, and was 
 for some time nearly blind. 
 
 She bore it with great patience, although it was a 
 great trial to one of her active temperament. She 
 was so extremely agile in every movement, a very 
 fairy with her golden curls and light step, that her 
 father used to call her his "Little Quicksilver." To lie 
 still was a difficult task for her ; but to know that she 
 must neither go to school nor study at home for a 
 long time was indeed dreadful news. 
 
 Her father's eyesight was now causing his family 
 great anxiety. He had married the Miss Cooke whose 
 words had done Frances so much good ; and after 
 Frances had been away from school for some months, 
 and had grown well again in North Wales, she 
 accompanied Mr. and Mrs. Havergal to Germany, 
 where her father placed himself under the care of a 
 great oculist, and his daughter in the Louisenschule, 
 Dusseldorf Her progress was wonderful there. 
 Here is her own account of the position she took : — 
 
 " All the masters were so well pleased with the 
 English girl's papers and conduct that they honoured 
 me with a Numero I, a thing they had never done 
 before. In religion I stood alone (as far as I know) 
 among a hundred and ten girls. This was very 
 bracing. There was very much enmity to any pro- 
 fession, and I came in for more unkindness than
 
 Frances Ridley Haver gal. 49 
 
 would have been possible in an average English 
 
 school." 
 
 Leaving school, Frances spent a little time in 
 the home of a German pastor, where she was very 
 happy. " I get up at five, breakfast at seven ; then 
 study for four hours. My books are nearly all 
 German, and I write abstracts. How I do enjoy 
 myself when I get to the German poets and Universal 
 History, which I dive into with avidity ! " 
 
 After her death. Pastor Schulze-Berge wrote to 
 her sister : " I instructed her in German composition, 
 literature, and history ; I learned to appreciate her 
 rich talents and mental powers. She showed from 
 the first such application, such depth of compre- 
 hension, that I can only speak of her progress as 
 extraordinary. What imprinted the stamp of nobility 
 upon her whole being was her true piety, and the 
 deep reverence she had for her Lord and Saviour, 
 whose example penetrated her young life through and 
 through." 
 
 At home, although supposed to be "finished," she 
 carefully kept up her foreign studies, and by her 
 father's help learned Greek enough to be able to 
 enjoy studying the New Testament. 
 
 Her pen was always going. It seemed a sort of 
 tap connected with her brain that could be turned on 
 only too easily. Of course, the young people who 
 would give anything, as they say, to be able to write, 
 wonder and envy this fast-flowing pen. But a flowing 
 
 D
 
 50 The World's Workers. 
 
 pen is a very doubtful literary gift : don't envy it. 
 \\'rite, if }'ou must write, with the pen you have. 
 The tap-like pen often runs mere twaddle or gush, 
 unless it draws its supplies from a well-stocked brain. 
 
 Frances Ridley Havergal, at eighteen or nineteen, 
 wrote and wrote and wrote. She would send her 
 enigmas and charades to various " pocket-books " 
 (which in those days used to contain such things), get 
 prizes for them, and give the money to the Church 
 Missionary Society. Her brain was full of " wild, 
 lovely, intangible ideas flitting across her mind, like 
 the shadows of a flying bird," and she was always 
 trying to fly after them 
 
 In her twentieth year she paid her first visit to 
 her sister Ellen (]\Irs. Shaw), who was married, and 
 living in Ireland. An Irish schoolgirl thus describes 
 her : " INIrs. Shaw brought us into the drawing-room. 
 In a few seconds Miss Frances, carolling like a bird, 
 flashed into the room ! Flashed, yes, like a burst of 
 sunshine, like a hill-side breeze, and stood before us, 
 her fair sunnj^ curls falling round her shoulders, her 
 bright eyes dancing, and her fresh sweet voice ringing 
 through the room. I shall never forget that afternoon, 
 never ! I sat perfectly spell-bound as she sang chant 
 and hymn with marvellous sweetness, and then played 
 two or three pieces of Handel, which thrilled me 
 through and through. 
 
 " As we girls walked home down the shady 
 avenue, one and another said : ' Oh, isn't she lovely !
 
 Finances Ridley Haver gal. 51 
 
 and doesn't she sing like a born angel ! ' 'I love her, 
 I do ; and I'd follow her every step of the way back 
 to England if I could.' 'Oh, she's a real Colleen 
 I^awn ! ' Another felt there must be the music of 
 God's own love in that fair singer's heart ; and that so 
 there was joy in her face, joy in her words, joy in her 
 ways. And the secret cry went up from that young 
 Irish heart : ' Lord, teach me, even me, to know and 
 love Thee too.' " 
 
 But Frances herself felt very keenly that she was 
 only a little child in the spiritual life. " Gleams and 
 glimpses," she writes in 1858, "but, oh, to be filled 
 with joy and the Holy Ghost ! oh, why cannot I 
 trust Him fully?" She read and learned the Scriptures 
 systematically with her friend, Elizabeth Clay (the 
 one to Avhom she so constantly wrote). In their 
 country walks Frances and her sister Maria would 
 repeat whole chapters in alternate verses. She knew 
 by heart the whole of the New Testament, the Psalms, 
 and Isaiah when about twenty-two, and afterwards 
 learned the minor prophets. Her home life was 
 beautiful, though only one knew the self-restraint and 
 the self-denial of actions, trivial in themselves, but 
 wrought for love to God. 
 
 The first definite notice of a literary success 
 outside her own circle is dated 1863, when she was 
 about twenty-seven. She had been asked for 
 poetical contributions by the editor of a monthly 
 magazine, and received a cheque for £\o 17s. 6d
 
 52 The World's Workers. 
 
 This was much more than she had expected. She at 
 once sent it to her father for Church purposes. Her 
 father's note on receiving it was found among her 
 papers : " My dear little Fan can hardly think how 
 much her poor papa loves her, thinks about her, 
 and prays for her. Yes, he does. Thank you, 
 dear child, for remembering me ; I will keep all 
 your love, but not the cheque. Our God send you 
 His sweetest and choicest blessings." 
 
 Her father died suddenly in 1870, to the intense 
 grief of his family. This loss, however, as all other 
 losses, only made the Divine promises more real to 
 Frances. "Thou art the Helper of the fatherless," 
 flashed brightly upon his daughter soon afterwards 
 when puzzling over a tune her father would have 
 decided at once. " I think," she adds, " that even in 
 music the Lord is my helper now." She now added 
 hymn tunes to her other work. 
 
 She had grown much in simple trustfulness. 
 "Writing is praying with me. You know a child 
 would look up at every sentence and say, ' And what 
 shall I say next.^' That is just what I do ; I ask 
 Him that at every line He would give me not merely 
 thoughts and power, but also every word, even the 
 very rhymes." 
 
 Three years or so after this we, however, find her 
 declaring that she had recently received a blessing 
 that had " lifted her whole life into sunshine, of which 
 all she had previously experienced was but as pale
 
 Frances _ Ridley Havekgal. 53 
 
 and passing April gleams compared with the fulness 
 of summer glory." 
 
 This blessing came to her through a tiny book 
 called "All for Jesus." It set forth a fulness of 
 blessincf to which she felt she had not attained. She 
 was gratefully conscious of having for many years 
 loved the Lord, and delighted in His service ; but " I 
 want," she wrote, " to come nearer still, to have full 
 realisation of John xiv. 21." A few words on the 
 power of Jesus to keep those who abide in Him made 
 her joyously exclaim : " I see it all ; I HAVE the 
 blessing ! " "I saw it," she says, " as a flash of 
 electric light, and what you see you can never unsee. 
 There must be full surrender before there can be full 
 blessedness. He Himself showed me all this most 
 clearly," 
 
 " One of the intensest moments of my life was 
 when I saw the force of that word ' cleanseth.' The 
 utterly unexpected and altogether unimagined sense 
 of its fulfilment to me, on simply beheving in its 
 fulness, was just indescribable. I expected nothing 
 like it short of heaven. Thus accepting, in simple 
 unquestioning faith, God's commands and promises, 
 one seems to be at once brought into intensified 
 views of everything. Never before did sin seem 
 so hateful, v/atchfulness so necessary, and with a keen- 
 ness and uninterruptedness, too, beyond what one 
 ever thought of, only somehow different ; not a dis- 
 tressed but a happy sort. Then, too, the " all for
 
 54 The World's Workers. 
 
 Jesus" comes in; one sees there is no half-way, it 
 must be absolutely all yielded up, because the least 
 unyielded or doubtful point is sin, let alone the great 
 fact of owing all to Him." 
 
 Every visit seemed now to open doors for her 
 loving words, and she longed for whole households to 
 taste with her the goodness of the Lord. 
 
 About this time she wrote her Consecration 
 Hymn, perhaps the most widely known of all her 
 writings. This is how it came into being. " I went," 
 she writes, " for a little visit of five days. There 
 were ten persons in the house, some unconverted 
 and long prayed for, some converted, but not 
 rejoicing Christians. He gave me the prayer, 
 ' Lord, give me all in this house ! ' And He just 
 did I Before I left every one had got a blessing." 
 
 " The last night of my visit I was too happy to 
 sleep, and passed most of the night in praise and 
 renewal of my own consecration, and these little 
 couplets formed themselves and chimed in my heart 
 one after another, till they finished with, Ever, ONLY, 
 ALL for Thee ! " 
 
 From December, 1873, the date of reading the 
 little book " All for Jesus," she literally carried out 
 her now famous couplet, 
 
 " Take my voice, and let me sing, 
 Always, only, for my King." 
 
 She had both a great taste for music and a good 
 knowledge of harmony, a natural and inherited turn
 
 Frances B.idley IIavergal. 
 
 DD 
 
 for melody, a ringi/g touch on the piano, a beautiful 
 and well-trained voice. These gifts she now entirely 
 devoted to Christ ; whether at home or in mixed 
 society she always "sang for Jesus." 
 
 " I was," said she, " at a large regular London 
 party lately, and I was so happy. He seemed to 
 give me the secret of His presence, and, of course, I 
 sang for Jesus, and did I not have a dead silence? 
 Afterwards I had two really important conversations 
 with strangers." 
 
 In the early part of 1874 she was expecting to 
 have made a firm literary footing in America, when 
 instead of the ^35 due to her, she received the news 
 that her publisher had failed. He held her written 
 promise to publish only with him as the condition 
 of his launching her books, so this seemed quite to 
 close America to her. " Positively," she wrote, " I 
 did not feel it at all, although I had built a good deal 
 on my American prospects ; now, " Thy will be 
 done " is not a sigh but only a song ! " 
 
 That same year (1874), after a happy autunm 
 holiday, she was returning from Switzerland in 
 perfect health, when somehow or another she caught 
 fever. When she reached her home, at Leamington, 
 she was very unwell, and was soon utterly prostrate 
 with typhoid fever. For a while she hovered between 
 life and death. Prayer was continually made for her 
 recovery by a very large number of friends. " Only," 
 she said, when getting better, " I did uol want them
 
 56 The World's Workers. 
 
 to pray that I might get well at all. I never thought 
 of death as going through the dark valley, or down to 
 the river ; it often seemed to me a going up to the 
 golden gates." 
 
 Some months later, when threatened with a 
 relapse, she said to her sister Maria, " I felt sure 
 illness was coming on ; and, as I lay down, the sweet 
 consciousness that I was just lying down in His dear 
 hand was so stilling." 
 
 Her recovery was extremely slow, but her room 
 was the brightest in the house. At last she was 
 carried down stairs, but for some time used crutches. 
 " So delicate with her needle," as many other writing 
 women have been, working for the Zenana Missions 
 was a great pleasure to her during her long con- 
 valescence. It was a year before she was able to use 
 her pen except for letters. 
 
 When sufficiently well she spent a long while 
 in preparing " Songs of Grace and Glory." " I 
 remember the day it was completed," writes her 
 sister ; " she came down from her study with a large 
 roll for post, and with holiday glee exclaimed, 
 ' There, it is all done ! Now I am free to write a 
 book ! ' " 
 
 A week after it was burned, stereotype plates and 
 all. The work had to be gone over again. Every 
 chord of her own had to be reproduced ; every chord 
 of others re-examined and revised. Frances, however, 
 was able to write of this disaster : " I have thanked
 
 FnANCES Ridley Havekgal. 57 
 
 Him for it more than I have prayed about it. He is 
 giving me the opportunity over again of doing it 
 more patiently." 
 
 The interesting details of the foreign trips she 
 so much enjoyed must all be left out for want of 
 space. When in Switzerland she wrote home a 
 number of descriptive letters and poems, which have 
 been published under the title of " Swiss Letters and 
 Alpine Poems." She was an enthusiastic mountain 
 climber, and once was within a hair's breadth of what 
 must have proved a fatal accident. In a sweet, brave 
 way, she took all the details of her life, whether 
 pleasant or painful, as from the hand of Christ 
 Himself. 
 
 When in Switzerland on one of the holiday trips 
 she so much enjoyed, with the full range of the 
 Jungfrau and Silberhorn in view, she caught a chill 
 by getting wet through in a thunderstorm, and was 
 seriously ill for a month, suffering many weary hours 
 of pain. 
 
 "One afternoon," writes Maria Havergal, "after 
 trying a new remedy, I begged her to shut her eyes 
 and try to sleep. When I returned she gave me the 
 lines, ' I take this pain. Lord Jesus.' ' You see,' she 
 said, ' I know something of the sweetness of taking 
 pain direct from His hand. I had just been saying 
 all this to the Lord, and then it came to me in this 
 hymn ; it wants no correction ; I always think God 
 gives me verse when it comes so, and it is worth any
 
 58 The World's Workers. 
 
 suffering if what I write will comfort some one at 
 some time ! While I was in such pain, the very lines 
 I've been waiting for came to me. Very often 
 strangers write and tell me that my lines comfort or 
 help them, even when I know there is not a spark of 
 poetry in them. Now / cannot tell what will comfort 
 others, so I ask God to let me write what will 
 
 do so." 
 
 This is only one among many incidents that 
 reveal how truly the longings expressed in her 
 "Worker's Prayer" (perhaps the most beautiful of 
 all her hymns) were the truest and deepest utter- 
 ances of her own soul. 
 
 " Lord, speak to me, that I may speak 
 In living echoes of Thy tone ; 
 As Thou hast sought, so let me seek 
 Thy erring children, lost and lone." 
 
 This sweet and earnest prayer has been so abun- 
 dantly answered, Miss Havergal's written words have 
 been made so true a blessing to such thousands of 
 souls, that anything like criticism would seem almost 
 sacrilegious ; all we can devoutly and thankfully say 
 is, she was one whose work the King, her King, 
 manifestly delighted to honour. The King Himself 
 crowned her. 
 
 But as well as the hymns, verses, little books, and 
 other sacred work which she was continually produc- 
 ing, she has left behind several books of poems and 
 letters on subjects we may venture to speak of This
 
 Frances Ridley Havergal. 59 
 
 large mass of writing would take a great deal more 
 space than we have here to sift and analyse. Like 
 most writers with a swift pen, she wrote far too much ; 
 not indeed for her thousands of devoted readers, who 
 eagerly seek out every scrap she wrote, but for her 
 own permanent literary reputation. These poems 
 and letters, always sweet, pure, and with a singularly 
 bright flash in them, are exceedingly uneven in merit. 
 They easily fall into the three classes of good, bad, 
 and indifferent. But nearly all of them appeal vividly 
 and at once to the average British ear, intelligence, 
 and fancy ; for although she was not a great poetess, 
 she was essentially a singer, and her singing was 
 true and helpful. To her had been committed the 
 Ministry of Song, a ministry not for the literary {q.\v^ 
 but for the weary many. 
 
 In May, 1878, Mrs. Havergal passed away, after 
 long and intense suffering ; to witness which, wrote 
 Frances, has " been by terrible things answering my 
 eager prayer for more teaching and closer drawing at 
 any cost." The home at Leamington was broken up. 
 Frances and Maria set up housekeeping together 
 near the Mumbles, on the Welsh coast. Maria went 
 there first. When Frances joined her, her first words 
 were : " I wanted so to get to you, Maria dear ! " 
 She was so very tired, that even the sea air and 
 perfect rest failed to refresh her for some time. 
 Afterwards she enjoyed scrambles on the cliffs, or 
 getting up to the top of the Mumbles lighthouse, and
 
 6o The World's Workers. 
 
 making the keeper tell her all he knew. Her tastes 
 were very simple. She delighted in wild flowers, and 
 in animals, from the great St. Bernard dogs to her pet 
 kittens. 
 
 The sisters arranged a cosy study in their Welsh 
 home ; " My work-shop," Frances called it. By the 
 door was her motto, "For Jesus' sake only," and her 
 temperance pledge card. The portrait of her father 
 and other relatives hung near. Then there was her 
 choice little library of books on all sorts of subjects, 
 her desk and writing-table, her favourite chair — a 
 relic of the childish days she spent at Astley Rectory 
 — and the American type-writer she found such a 
 relief to her tired eyes. She was wonderfully neat 
 and methodical in all her arrangements. Her many 
 letters were all carefully docketed ; paper and string 
 in their own corners; no litter ever allowed. "*/« 
 order' (i Cor. xiv. 40) is something more than being 
 tidy ! Something analogous to ' keeping rank.'" 
 
 She contrived a stand for her harp-piano, and 
 there she composed her hymn tunes. Often she 
 turned to the little instrument as a relief from severer 
 work. 
 
 Early rising and early studying were her rule ; 
 and she was careful to avoid late hours. At seven in 
 the morning during summer, and at eight in winter, 
 she was at her table studying her Bible. 
 
 How diligently she studied that Bible the page 
 given in her "Life" will show, its margin is full of
 
 Frances Ridley Havergal. 6i 
 
 references in the clearest, most minute hand, with 
 carefully ruled lines connectincj the thought or idea 
 of one verse to the same thought, or perhaps its 
 contrast, in another. 
 
 She was very particular about the cross-readings 
 in her Bible. Sometimes, on bitterly cold mornings, 
 Maria would beg her to read with her feet by the fire. 
 " But then," Frances would reply, " I can't rule my 
 lines neatly ; just see what a find I've got ! If one 
 only searches, there are such extraordinary things in 
 the Bible ! " 
 
 She never spared herself People wrote to her 
 on every conceivable subject, and she was only too 
 ready to answer and help. "What shall I do.'*" she 
 writes " your letter would take two hours to answer, 
 and I have not two minutes ; fifteen to twenty letters 
 to write every morning, proofs to correct, editors 
 waiting for articles, poems and music I cannot touch, 
 American publishers clamouring for poems or any 
 manuscripts, four Bible readings or classes weekly, 
 many anxious ones waiting for help, a Mission week 
 coming, and other work after that. And my doctor 
 says my physique is too weak to balance the nerves 
 and brain, and that I ought not to touch a pen." 
 But it was a sad wearing away of her strength. 
 She longed for a lull in her life ; but the lull 
 never came. " Dear wearied sister ! " Maria adds, 
 " Once she said : ' I do hope the angels will have 
 orders to let me alone a bit, when I first get
 
 62 The World's Wor/cers. 
 
 to heaven ! ' " Yes, with all her many gifts she had 
 never learned how to conjugate the verb " to laze ! " 
 An innumerable host of little things to be done for 
 others continually oppressed her ; yet she always 
 wrote pleasantly and cheerily, refreshing others, al- 
 though she was only too literally wearied to death 
 herself. 
 
 A plan of work for 1879 was found in her desk, 
 but before Midsummer came she had been called 
 to her home to the land where work and rest are 
 one. 
 
 Many of us remember the little sky-blue book 
 with the golden stars and celestial crown which gave 
 an account of the last week of Frances Ridley 
 Havergal's earthly life, and the cry of mingled grief 
 and triumph that went up from tens of thousands of 
 Christian hearts when it was known that the sweet 
 singer who had been so helpful to them would sing to 
 them no more, on earth, for ever. 
 
 On ]\Tay the 21st, 1879, Frances Havergal returned 
 home wet and chilly. The next da}% being Ascension 
 Day, she was so very tired after church, that she rode 
 home on a donkey. Quite a procession of boys follow- 
 ed her, listening eagerly to all she said. 
 
 Fred Rosser, her donkey-boy, remembers that 
 she told him : " I had better leave the devil's side ; 
 that Jesus Christ's was the winning side, and wouldn't 
 I choose Him for my captain." That Avas the last 
 time she was out. Four days afterward she corrected
 
 Frances Ridley Havergal. Ct, 
 
 the proof of " Morning Stars," and then lay down her 
 pen for ever. 
 
 She was not suffering much then, Ijnng quietly in 
 bed, her pet kittens Trot and Dot near her. 
 Then fever and all the agony of peritonitis came on 
 rapidly ; but her peace and joy shone through the 
 severest sufferings. When they were distressed for her, 
 she whispered, " It's home the faster !" 
 
 "God's will is diiicioiis ; He makes no mistakes." 
 Nothing alleviated the agonising pain ; but again 
 and again she was heard through the last hours 
 murmuring " So beautiful to go I " The vicar of Swan- 
 sea came in for a few minutes. He said, " You have 
 talked and written a great deal about the King. Is 
 Jesus with you now?" " Of course !" she answered. 
 " Oh, I want all of you to speak bright, BRIGHT 
 words about Jesus ! Oh do, do ! It is all perfect peace, 
 I am only waiting for Jesus to take me in." Later, 
 whispering the names of many dear ones, she added, 
 " I love them all ! I want all to come to me in 
 heaven; tell them to trust Jesus." Then clearly, though 
 faintly, she sang the whole of the verse beginning : 
 "Jesus, I will trust Thee," to her own tune " Hermas." 
 Then came a terrible convulsive sickness. It ceased. 
 The nurse gently assisting her, she nestled down in 
 the pillow, folded her hands, saying, " There, now it is 
 all over ! Blessed rest ! " 
 
 She looked up steadfastly as if she saw the Lord. 
 For ten minutes they watched that almost visible
 
 64 The World's Workers. 
 
 meeting with her King, and her countenance was so 
 glad, as if she were already talking to Him. 
 
 Then she tried to sing ; but after one sweet high 
 note, " He — ," her voice failed, and as her brother 
 commended her soul into her Redeemer's hands, she 
 passed away to meet the King in His beauty. 
 
 {Our Portrait is from a Photograph by Elliott and Fry, Loiuion).
 
 CATHERINE MARSH. 
 
 MANY years ago I walked over to Beckenham 
 from Sydenham with a party of young friends 
 for the purpose of hearing Miss Marsh speak at her 
 then famous cottage meetings. Like every one else, 
 we had all been reading the " Memorials of Captain 
 Hedley Vicars," that brave young soldier of Christ 
 and of the Queen who had lived and died so nobly 
 in the deadly trenches before Sebastopol, and who 
 dared to take the open Bible for " his colours." We 
 had also heard a great deal about Miss Marsh and 
 her work among the navvies ; so having an oppor- 
 tunity of going to Beckenham, we went. 
 
 The memory of that evening is still clear and 
 
 bri<~''ht I 
 
 ^ ' "Mid many a day struck calm," 
 
 I can still see the Crystal Palace shining on the 
 hills, still see the young forms slowly strolling through 
 the level fields, still feel the grave, religious question- 
 ing in the restless young hearts. 
 
 Presently we left the fields and turned into the 
 highway that wound through a quaint, rustic village. 
 We paused before the old lych-gate with its broad 
 E
 
 66 The World's Workers. 
 
 weather-worn covering, we gazed at the solemn 
 avenue of tall, dark yew-trees that led up to the door 
 of Beckenham Church. Mow grave, how rural, how 
 quiet it was ! Then we went on through the anti- 
 quated village until we came to the room where the 
 meeting was to be held. It was the ground floor of 
 an old cottage, and was called a coffee shop. 
 
 We were much too early. A neat respectable- 
 looking woman was ironing at a table that occupied 
 the centre of the room. There were no signs of 
 preparation ; so we went out again and \\alked 
 about. In due time we returned. The big table 
 had vanished, the room was full of forms, and a 
 number of navvies were heavily pounding in and 
 flinging themselves on to the forms. We were, how- 
 ever, still early, and found good seats. 
 
 Presently two ladies, elegantly dressed in the 
 fashion of that day, came in. There had been a 
 wedding at the Rectory, and the ladies had evidently 
 come to the meeting just as they were. The one 
 was the sister of Hedley Vicars, the other — tall, fair, 
 and of commanding presence — was Miss Marsh her- 
 self, who at once began the simple service. 
 
 She read the fifth chapter of St. Luke. Her 
 comments upon it must have been very striking, 
 because what I remember so vividly is, not the room 
 at Beckenham and the English navvies, but the 
 Jewish fishermen washing their nets by the lake of 
 Gennesaret, the Saviour coming to them and preach-
 
 Catherine Marsh. 67 
 
 iiig out of their boat, the Divine command, " Launch 
 out into the deep," the multitude of fishes so great 
 that the net brake, and Simon Peter's " Dcpaj't from 
 me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord ! " 
 
 But when it came to that so human outcry, then I 
 knew I was in Beckenham ; for then I felt rather than 
 saw that the great rough heads of the navvies were 
 bowing low, that tears were rolling down their cheeks ; 
 then I heard the motherless girl who sat next me 
 crying. Then, like rain upon the thirsty earth, 
 seemed the speaker's earnest pleading : '' Oh, shall 
 not we the rather reverse the plea, and cry out of the 
 great need of our own hearts, " Come to me and 
 never leave me, Lord Jesus, for I am a sinner lost 
 and undone without Thee ! " 
 
 ^ ■}(• ^ ^ ^ -x- 
 
 It so fell out that I never visited Beckenham 
 from that never-to-be-forgotten evening until early 
 in 1885. 
 
 Everything was as changed as myself. I went 
 alone. The railway carried me over such of the level 
 fields as yet remain below the hills on which stands 
 the Crystal Palace, and past the gardens of innumer- 
 able villa residences. 
 
 I alighted at a large station in the centre of a 
 wealthy and populous suburban town, where the 
 only thing I could recognise was the very tall spire 
 of the old church. It was a fine afternoon ; many 
 carriages, many pretty girls charmingly dressedi
 
 68 The World's Workers. 
 
 many lovely babies arrayed in spotless creami- 
 nesses of lace and cashmere, and reposing in 
 luxurious wheeled bassinets, gave the place a par- 
 ticularly well-to-do aspect. The old churchyard 
 was all but overshadowed by a new Town Hall of the 
 " Queen Anne " pattern, glowing with red brick, next 
 to which was a gorgeous " Board of Works," and an 
 equally grand new bank, which turned the corner of a 
 flourishing row of " Queen Anne " shops dignified by 
 the name of the " Parade." 
 
 In the midst of all this modern srnartness I found 
 the old lych-gate and the yew-trees still surviving, 
 just as you may see them in the frontispiece of Miss 
 Marsh's little book, " A Light for the Line." But the 
 long rows of navvies in their white, stiff-starched 
 smocks — shown also in that frontispiece — who had 
 come to do the last honours to their comrade, 
 Thomas Ward, were all gone. I went through the 
 gate, and found that grave of his. Alas ! so stained 
 with rain drips from the yew-trees is it, and so fast 
 is the stone crumbling, that it was with difficulty I 
 made out the noble words : 
 
 " Jesus Christ for every man." 
 
 Beckenham had passed into other hands. It 
 made me sad to see this memorial so neglected. 
 The church was open, so I went in ; it was full of 
 interest. At the west end of the church you are sur- 
 prised to find deep and lofty galleries rising one above
 
 Catherine Marsh. Cg 
 
 the other, in a manner shocking to the lover of Gothic 
 architecture, but exceedingly interesting and touch- 
 ine to those whose hearts have been thrilled with 
 the accounts scattered through Miss Marsh's books 
 of hard hearts won to Christ in those pews, in those 
 galleries. 
 
 This was the passage from Miss Marsh's "A 
 Light for the Line " that was most strongly in my 
 mind while in Beckenham Church : " So warm was 
 the navvies' affection for Thomas Ward's memory^ 
 that on the night following his death there was 
 scarcely a dry eye as I told them his last words: 
 'Jesus Christ for every man. Blessed, blessed 
 Jesus ! ' We believed that God had a message for 
 them all, as well as for ourselves, in the death of 
 Thomas Ward, and earnestly desired that not one 
 should lose his share of the blessing." 
 
 Accordingly, they were all invited to attend the 
 afternoon service in Beckenham Church, previous to 
 the burial. The aisles and many of the pews were 
 crowded with men dressed in white clothes. They 
 joined earnestly in the responses, and some were 
 affected to tears when, at the close of the third collect 
 for the afternoon service, a hymn was sung which 
 seemed almost a paraphrase of Thomas's last words, 
 and of that world-wide Gospel he had preached from 
 his dying bed : 
 
 " Salvation ! Oh the joyful sound ! 
 'Tis music to our eais."
 
 70 The World's Workers. 
 
 Mr. Chalmers (IMIss Marsh's brother-in-law), then 
 Rector of Beckenham, preached a beautiful and im- 
 pressive sermon on " Devout men carried Stephen 
 to his burial, and made great lamentation over 
 him." 
 
 Within the chancel rails is a tablet to the beloved 
 memory of Captain Hedley Vicars, and on the oppo- 
 site wall to it another to Dr. Marsh, the venerable 
 father of the great and good woman who has made 
 Beckenham a household name wherever the English 
 language is read or spoken. 
 
 I left the time-honoured sanctuary, and went 
 into the town in search of the coffee-room in which 
 I had heard Miss Marsh speak and pray. A long 
 shop, full of the newest things in saddlery, had been 
 run out from it ; although a few genuine old houses 
 still remained intact among the hundreds of " Tudor," 
 "Jacobean," or "Queen Anne "shops and villas. A 
 large and elegant coffee-tavern, however, showed that 
 temperance work was flourishing. 
 
 Quite at the other end of the village — the town I 
 mean — when I had despaired of finding any one who 
 remembered Miss Marsh, I espied, standing outside 
 a cottage, an elderly man, so much stiffened by 
 rheumatism as to need a crutch. I felt he must be 
 an old inhabitant, so I asked him if he remembered 
 Miss Marsh. " Aye ! that he did ! But she'd been 
 gone a long while." We had a little talk about her, 
 which seemed to please him as much as it did mc.
 
 Catherine Marsh. 71 
 
 "You should have seen her coming along the line to 
 we," he said warmly, " with the mud and slush over 
 the top of her shoes! But she didn't care for that, 
 not she ! I come along with the navvies when they 
 come to make the line. Ah ! you should have seen 
 her a walking along up the line ! And they were a 
 rough lot too, but they took to her ; there's none of 
 'em as 'ud have hurt her. Not they ! They liked her 
 too much ! " 
 
 This was the impression I took home with me ; 
 the tall and dignified figure of that devoted woman 
 going up the half-made line in all weathers, that she 
 might take the message of the Gospel to those home- 
 less working men ; going again and again until she 
 won from them the exclamation, " We know you 
 cares for our souls ! " until she brought many and 
 many a one to Christ, until she was able to show 
 to all the world that a British navvy could be in very 
 deed and truth a Christian and a gentleman. 
 
 ■X- -x- -x- ^f ^ * 
 
 Catherine Marsh is the youngest child of most 
 devoted Christians. Her father was Dr. William 
 Marsh, whose memory is still revered as an earnest 
 evangelical clergyman of singular beauty and purity 
 of life, and of great practical benevolence ; her mother 
 was all that the wife of such a man should be, a 
 woman of winning countenance and manners, of re- 
 fined and cultivated mind, with warm afifections, and a 
 sweet, self-sacrificing nature that made her the centre
 
 72 The World's Workers. 
 
 of jo}' in her home. Best of all, she had in early life 
 entirely devoted herself to her Redeemer's service. 
 
 She had heard of William Marsh, and of his 
 youthful consecration, before they met. When they 
 met it was but natural that a strong attachment 
 should spring up between them. It was a holy and 
 blessed love given to them by God, which grew and 
 gathered strength as the years passed on, rooted 
 in their firm purpose that in all things Christ should 
 have the pre-eminence. 
 
 William Marsh was a curate when he met Miss 
 Tilson, and as the son and heir of the gallant Colonel 
 Sir Charles Marsh, he was welcomed by her family, 
 and an engagement permitted. But after it had 
 lasted only a few months, Sir Charles suddenly lost 
 his property, and Mrs. Tilson thought it right to break 
 off the engagement. 
 
 It was a terrible trial to both the young people, 
 yet so keen a sense of the honour due to parents had 
 they, that for more than three years Maria Tilson 
 not only never exchanged a letter with her lover, but 
 even thought it her duty to deny herself the comfort 
 of hearing from their common friends of William 
 Marsh's welfare ; while he, as honourably, never 
 attempted the slightest renewal of the intercourse. 
 For three long years, therefore, they could only 
 meet in spirit " in the sanctuary of the presence of 
 their God." 
 
 At length they had their reward. The mother's
 
 Catherine Marsh. 73 
 
 heart was so deeply touched by her daughter's 
 submission, that during her last, long illness she 
 freely consented to the marriage. Nor was that all ; 
 before she died there came from that mother's lips 
 the sweet testhnony that her child's conduct had so 
 convinced her of the reality and power of religion, 
 that she had herself sought and found like pre- 
 cious faith in Christ Jesus. This was indeed worth 
 waiting for. 
 
 After her marriage to one whom Mr. Simeon, 
 of Cambridge, describes as "that loveliest and most 
 heavenly-minded of men," her character grew and 
 expanded most beautifully ; her faith became more 
 simple, her hope more assured, her charity the steady 
 flame which Divine love kindles, and her confidence 
 in her Saviour more entire. 
 
 Charles Kingsley has left us a charming portrait 
 of Dr. Marsh, which will not only show us what 
 manner of man he was, but among what influences 
 his children grew up. 
 
 " I recollect him now. A man who had been 
 peculiarly graceful and handsome ; tall, delicate- 
 featured, with the air noble of the old regime ; with 
 a voice and manner full of suavity, even to tender- 
 ness, which you felt to be sincere from the earnest- 
 ness of the voice and the honesty of the eye. 
 Belonging to the old evangelical school, to which 
 all later schools owe their vitality, he seemed to me 
 no bigot, but ready to welcome, or at least patiently
 
 74 The World's Workers. 
 
 to hear, novel thoughts which did not interfere with 
 fundamental truth. He belonged in thought, as 
 well as in manner, to a class of ministers which is 
 growing, alas! more rare among us; he fulfilled 
 rather my notion of what the purest German evan- 
 gelical of the last century must have been like, those 
 who, with Spener and Franke, re-awakened vital 
 Christianity among a dry and dead generation, given 
 up to the letter of Lutheran ism and forgetful of its 
 spirit. In his goodness there was no severity ; on the 
 contrary, a gentle benignity, which made his presence 
 always a source of happiness to his relatives and 
 friends." 
 
 Dr. Marsh was vicar of the small rural living of 
 Basildon when he married, but not long afterwards he 
 removed to St. Peter's, Colchester, where he resided 
 for fifteen years, and where his ministry was very 
 richly blessed. It was at Colchester that Catherine 
 was born. 
 
 The home-life of this family was singularly bright 
 and happy. We get many a glimpse of its cheerful, 
 busy piety in the " Memoir of Dr. Marsh," which 
 his daughter Catherine published, and also in " Home 
 Light," a little volume containing a sketch of Mrs. 
 Marsh and a number of her letters. 
 
 The children at a very early age followed the 
 example of their parents. " My dear children," 
 writes Mrs. Marsh from Colchester, " are going on 
 delightfully ; they spend all their pocket-money on
 
 Catherine Marsh. 75 
 
 the poor." Catherine was " the baby." Her mother 
 generally writes of her as " Little C," and to her as 
 " my tenderly beloved little child," or " my most 
 precious little child." 
 
 "Little C. is amusing herself with a pen," is about 
 the earliest notice we have of the future authoress of 
 " Hedley Vicars," and " English Hearts and English 
 Hands." It is certainly characteristic. 
 
 Catherine Marsh seems to have taken to her 
 pen when quite young ; like three out of the four 
 heroines of this volume, and, indeed, in common with 
 most clever girls and beys, she had a trick of writing 
 verses — vigorous verses too. 
 
 Here are a few lines which were written inside the 
 cover of her French exercise-book when scarcely more 
 than a child. They give a good idea of the happiness 
 of her young days. 
 
 "Happy my infancy was and gay, 
 Sunny and bright as mornings in May ; 
 When my sweet sisters and brothers played 
 With ' the baby ' in the chestnut shade. 
 Or sauntered in summer in the woods, 
 Lighting our fire, and bringing our goods 
 For the wondrous charms of a gipsy tea, 
 By spreading oak and sycamore tree." 
 
 But the children, even " the baby," grew up, and 
 not long after they had again moved, this time to the 
 crowded town of Birmingham, a heavy blow fell upon 
 them. The dear mother was taken.
 
 76 The World's Workers. 
 
 " Sweet mother ! " Catherine Marsh goes on in 
 the httle poem just quoted from her " Memory's 
 Pictures " — 
 
 " Sweet mother ! all these are fled, and we 
 Have lost our childhood in losing thee." 
 
 That loss created indeed what Dr. Marsh called a 
 "tremendous vacuum;" he add.', however, "my 
 beloved children do all in their power to comfort me, 
 and try to conceal their own anguish." 
 
 The whole family was remarkable for very strong 
 affection, and although the elder branches married 
 and left the old home^ their love for it and for the 
 father who was its glory never diminished. Cathe- 
 rine, the youngest, however, devoted herself to her 
 father with all the strength of her loving nature. 
 Both in her memoir of him and in her little verses 
 her father is shown to the world as the centre of her 
 earthly life, her guide and companion to the better 
 land. 
 
 About seven years after his wife's death he 
 suffered severely from cataract, and for a time quite 
 lost his sight. Catherine was a most tender nurse 
 to him during that time. For many nights he 
 could only obtain even the short relief of an hour's 
 sleep by listening to the reading of the Bible in a 
 low voice. The New Testament was read through 
 from beginning to end. 
 
 " What can we do now our book is finished? " his 
 daughter asked. To which he replied with character-
 
 Catherine Marsh. yy 
 
 istic playfulness : " Send for a second volume." She 
 relates how 
 
 " He said one weary day 
 
 When he was faint and blind, 
 'Thy gentle arm shall be my stay, 
 And there my rest I'll find.' " 
 
 And how her very heart was choked with tears, and 
 that she felt that if before her there lay the choice 
 of a long, bright life, or the soothing of his blindness 
 and pain : 
 
 " With all their sadness, I would rather 
 Have these still hours with thee, my father." 
 
 Happily she was spared the painful choice, for an 
 operation he underwent was successful, and sight was 
 restored. 
 
 But Catherine Marsh is so distinctly to the public 
 Miss Marsh of Beckenham, that we must not linger 
 to trace her useful, busy early life as a clergyman's 
 daughter at Birmingham and then at Leamington. 
 
 When 1 85 1 arrived Dr. Marsh had already long 
 passed his three-score years and ten, and his charge 
 at Leamington had become too much for him. 
 
 His son-in-law, the Rev. F. Chalmers, who had just 
 been presented to the living of Beckenham, begged 
 Dr. Marsh, most affectionately, to come to Becken- 
 ham and make a home in its Rectory. He did so, 
 and of course Miss Marsh went with him. They 
 were welcomed with the greatest rejoicing, and at 
 once joined in the rector's many schemes for the
 
 7& The World's Workers. 
 
 good of the neighbourhood with their accustomed 
 energy ; but it is not until the summer of 1853 that 
 Miss Marsh seems, in the eyes of the general religious 
 public, to stand out in all her striking individuality. 
 
 It is in " English Hearts and English Hands " 
 that Miss Marsh of Bcckenham lives and will live for 
 many a year to come. Here, quite unconsciously, in 
 recording what she felt to be God's work, she has 
 drawn her own portrait to the life, while in her 
 father's memoir she has most conscientiously hidden 
 herself; although even when she was quite young 
 the true incidents related in her little books, " The 
 Golden Chain " and " The Rift in the Cloud," which 
 we dare not stay to describe, show the power she has 
 always possessed of knowing how to meet the diffi- 
 culties of very various minds. Another beautiful in- 
 stance of this occurred when she was still in her teens, 
 and is told in "Dreamlight from Heaven." 
 
 If genuine human feeling can be put into a book, 
 that feeling can never grow old. The author dies, the 
 book itself is pushed aside and buried under huge 
 heaps of new publications, but unearth it, and there 
 you will find the emotion still alive, still throbbing as 
 vigorously as when it was first put on paper. 
 
 All Miss Marsh's books are instinct with 
 genuine feeling ; but few records in our language are 
 fuller of this strong vitality than her " English Hearts 
 and English Hands." Happily we have not to 
 unearth it, for it has never ceased to be popular ; its
 
 Catherine Marsh. 79 
 
 thirty years hav^c not dimmed its brightness ; it is 
 still one of the most living books of its class. 
 
 The crowd of rough navvies with their tumultuous 
 joys and sorrows, their struggles for goodness, their 
 sudden falls, all surging round the grand woman who 
 alone could control them, who alone could love and 
 admire them, and draw out their best qualities, live 
 in these wonderful pages ; we cannot say they live 
 over again, for they have never ceased to pulsate with 
 strong and genuine emotion. 
 
 It was early in 1853 that nearly three thousand 
 navvies invaded the quiet woods on the Sydenham 
 hills for the purpose of turning them into the great 
 pleasure gardens of the Crystal Palace. The villages 
 around soon swarmed with excavators ; two hundred 
 went over to Beckenham to lodge, and most of the 
 good people of the neighbourhood began to fear that 
 they \vould prove very troublesome lodgers. Pro- 
 bably Catherine Marsh may have thought so too, but 
 whatever her forebodings, she at once determined to 
 gain the friendship of these rough new-comers if it 
 were possible to do so. 
 
 In those days no one had discovered the navvy's 
 good qualities : with his heavy boots clogged with 
 clay, his earth-coloured clothes and his habit of 
 going about in gangs, the stranger navvy was a 
 person few people cared to have much to do with 
 before Miss Marsh showed the way to his heart. 
 
 The two hundred navvies had not been long at
 
 8o The WorliSs Workers. 
 
 Beckcnham before Miss Marsh went out one spring 
 Sunday evening about seven o'clock on her first 
 voyage of discovery. 
 
 Several of the men were lodging in a cottage 
 belonging to a family she had formerly visited during 
 the illness of one of its members ; so she went, not 
 without trembling doubtless, and asked after her late 
 patient. 
 
 A tall strong man in a fustian jacket, who had 
 opened the door scarcely wide enough to allow his 
 face to be seen, replied gruffly, " Harry ain't here just 
 now." 
 
 " But I suppose I shall see him if I wait ? I will 
 walk in, if you will allow me," said Miss Marsh. 
 
 " Well, you can if you like, but we're a lot of 
 rough uns." 
 
 Undeterred by the surly response, she went in, 
 saying as she entered, ** Would you get me a 
 chair >. " 
 
 An intelligent-looking young fellow flew forward, 
 dusted a chair with the tail of another man's coat and 
 placed it near the table. Miss Marsh asked them if 
 they had been to church. They said they had never 
 thought of it. So she told them how the morning's 
 sermon had been about a brave, good doctor who 
 had recently died. 
 
 Some of the men had known him and had been 
 helped by him. When the little story was ended the 
 young man who had dusted the chair with another
 
 Catherine Marsh. Si 
 
 man's coat said, " \A'cll, ma'am, it's a beautiful story, 
 but in a measure it passes by me, because I don't 
 believe the Bible. I read in the Bible that God is 
 a God of love, and yet that He has prepared for 
 all eternity a place of torment for us poor, pitiful 
 creatures." 
 
 "In my Bible," Miss Marsh replied, " I have never 
 read anything of the sort ; " and then she went on 
 to show them that in spite of their hard thoughts, 
 it was still eternally true that God is Love. 
 
 She spoke earnestly for some time, telling them 
 that God SO loved the World that He gave His 
 Son, all for one purpose, " to seek and save that 
 which is lost. He is drawing nigh, He is come to 
 you now," she ended ; " He is speaking these words of 
 His own by my feeble lips. Are you willing to let 
 Him save you? " 
 
 " I am, I ^am," the young man said with fervour, 
 drawing his chair nearer hers. " I never thought of 
 Him before but as an angry God ; you make Him 
 out a Friendr 
 
 " Shall I pray with you ? " asked Miss Marsh. 
 
 " I should like it. But t/it's man," pointing 
 to one behind him, "never opens his mouth but to 
 swear." 
 
 " But he will open it to ^rq}> now. Will you not, 
 my friend ? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 And as they all knelt together, their voices
 
 82 The Worlds Workers. 
 
 followed hers, and two or three sobs burst from 
 those strong men. 
 
 From this beginning sprang up those wonderful 
 Cottage Bible Readings the story of which has 
 delighted so many thousands of people throughout 
 the world, and set so many of them working for the 
 good of their neighbours. 
 
 " English Hearts and English Hands " has proved 
 a most inspiring book ; it has been the pioneer of 
 innumerable efforts to reach the working classes. 
 Many are the well-known workers whom Miss 
 Marsh's steady faith and loving resolute perseverance 
 that refuses to be discouraged, have been the means 
 of raising up. 
 
 She believed in the Gospel. She believed too 
 that it was the very Christ of that Gospel that her 
 Beckenham navvies needed. According to her faith 
 so it was to her. 
 
 Her portraits of the navvies are drawn with a 
 most vigorous but a most loving touch. Here, for 
 
 instance is "John H . His fair face, straight 
 
 features, and almost white hair, were eminently 
 Saxon, and he himself the wildest piece of nature I 
 had then seen." He doesn't go to church, won't hear 
 of such a thing. But she gets him to take a little 
 Testament, and soon we see him sitting down on the 
 doorstep twirling it round between his finger and 
 thumb, and exclaiming, " Now, ain't it a rare beauty } 
 I'll cover it with a slice off my best red choker ! "
 
 Catherine Marsh. S3 
 
 Miss Marsh had all sorts of womanly ways for 
 getting at these rough fellows. When she was going 
 away from home she wrote notes in large printing 
 characters to them, asking them to attend church 
 regularly, and the next Sunday morning the middle 
 aisle was full of clean stiff white smocks. She asked 
 
 John H if he had received her letter } " A letter, 
 
 a letter for me ! " shouted the laddie with the lint- 
 white locks ; " all the way from where you went ! 
 Well, the postman did bring me one, and I said 
 * 'Tain't for me. Nobody cares to write to me ; so I 
 sent it back. But I'll go and pull the post-office 
 about their ears if they don't give it me back 
 again!'" 
 
 Very stirring are some of the scenes in that 
 record. Navvies, even under her influence, were 
 sometimes but navvies still. Angry words and furious 
 blows followed too often upon the most generous 
 kindness. Paget, one of her most hopeful men, told 
 her on an evening that was both Sunday and New 
 Year's Day that if "Long George" came to the meet- 
 ing he should order him out. The whole scene is 
 graphically described, but too long for our space. 
 Miss Marsh pleaded first with one and then went to 
 the other, and separately each one could not let her 
 "go home sorry;" but when after much difficulty she 
 brought them face to face for the purpose of making 
 it up, there came such loud talking that she feared a 
 fight would ensue. Fists were raised and shaken in
 
 84 The World's Workers. 
 
 each other's faces, the men were growing more and 
 more furious, and their threats louder and louder, 
 when Miss Marsh glided in between the two navvies 
 with; 
 
 "Oh, Paget! oh, George! We must have no more. 
 Let us kneel down and pray that the God of peace 
 would prove Himself stronger than the devil. At first," 
 she says, " I knelt alone, but soon heard the two men 
 suddenly fall on their knees ; and when we rose up 
 the tears were rolling down Paget's cheeks." 
 
 "After that prayer," he cried, "I'll forgive him 
 from my heart out." 
 
 But still George would not yield. Miss Marsh 
 pleaded desperately with him. He stood irresolute, 
 but sullen. 
 
 " Give me your hand," she said at last. 
 
 " That I will." 
 
 " And now, Paget, give me yours." And the two 
 huge, rough hands met in hers. 
 
 The whole book is so teeming with living interest 
 that it is hard to leave any of it unnoticed ; happily 
 the book itself is very cheap. But in case some one 
 who reads this may not have seen Miss Marsh's 
 description of the battle of Penge, I must condense 
 it here. 
 
 The navvies who had been chosen for the Army 
 Works Corps were massed at the Crystal Palace 
 before they were sent out to the Crimean War. Six 
 or seven hundred of these men with their wages in
 
 Catherine Marsh. 85 
 
 their pockets were kept waiting in idleness there for 
 several days. 
 
 Rather fewer than a hundred of these men, who 
 were lodging at Pcnge, spent a night, which they had 
 every reason to believe would be their last in 
 England, in a drunken revel. 
 
 The next afternoon Miss Marsh and her sister 
 drove to the Crystal Palace gates to enquire when the 
 embarkation was likely to take place. Two of the 
 men of business of the corps hurried to the carriage. 
 
 " Pray drive down to Penge at once," they said. 
 " There's a fight going on between the police and 
 some of our men, but if you ask them they will go 
 away quietly, drunk or sober." The ladies drove to 
 Penge, where they saw two policemen who had been 
 terribly hurt, and seven men who had been taken 
 prisoners. About fifty navvies, all more or less in- 
 toxicated, had formed a ring and had begun boxing. 
 The police had interfered, laying about them with 
 their staves. The mob had been roused to fury, there 
 had been a fight. At the moment of the ladies' 
 arrival the mob had, however, dispersed ; but a few 
 minutes later a great crowd of navvies poured down 
 the hill and from the Crystal Palace gates shouting, 
 
 " Down with the police ! Rescue the prisoners ! 
 Punish the police well ! " 
 
 The police stood their ground steadily, but were 
 soon overwhelmed by the yelling crowd. The moment 
 was come. The ladies drove between the infuriated
 
 86 The World's Workers. 
 
 men, and like Nehemiah, Miss Marsh " prayed to the 
 God of heaven." Then, turning to the crowd of five 
 hundred furious navvies, many of whom had already 
 upraised missiles, she said, 
 
 " The first man who throws a stone is my enemy. 
 Go back, and give over, for my sake, for the sake of 
 that God of peace of whom I have so loved to speak 
 with you." There was a brief silence. 
 
 " Do you go away, ma'am," then some of them 
 said. " We wouldn't hurt you for anything ; but it 
 is not fair to hinder us paying off the pleece." 
 
 " I shall not go away till you are gone, if I stay 
 here till midnight," returned Miss Marsh firmly. 
 
 " We don't want to vex you," said two or three 
 spokesmen, " but we will set our mates free." 
 
 " They sliall be free," exclaimed Miss Marsh, who, 
 with the navvies, thought "the mates" unjustly made 
 prisoners. " If there's justice in England, they shall 
 be free to go with you to the Crimea. I pledge 
 myself not to rest till it is done. Will you trust 
 me?" 
 
 There was a pause, and then a short conference 
 between the leaders was followed by loud shouts of, 
 " Trust ye to the world's end." 
 
 " Then prove it by going back within the Crystal 
 Palace gates." 
 
 In five minutes Miss Marsh was left alone with 
 the police and the prisoners. 
 
 The whole of Miss Marsh's treatment of her
 
 Catherine Marsh. 87 
 
 navvies showed equal resolution. One hardly knows 
 which to admire the more, her determination or her 
 tenderness. How beautifully both are united in the 
 following : 
 
 One of her most hopeful men having been accused 
 by his mates of being stingy, the one charge the 
 navvy dreads above everything, had, to prove the 
 falseness of the accusation, treated his mates and 
 cleared himself, although he had been obliged to sell 
 his clothes to do so. 
 
 When he came to his sober senses again he was 
 terribly distressed. Miss Marsh went to see him. 
 He would not meet her. His wife tried to persuade 
 him to come down, but he said, 
 
 "Where's the good of being pulled up to be better 
 for a day or too, only to go down the lower after- 
 wards ? " 
 
 "Tell him," said Miss Marsh, "that I shall stay 
 here until he comes." 
 
 He was a long while coming, but at last he came 
 with slow, unwilling step. 
 
 "It is no use at all ; I've sold my soul to the 
 devil," he said sullenly. 
 
 " But he shall not have it ; it is not yours to sell. 
 Jesus Christ has bought it with His own blood. Oh, 
 William, I must, I will have it for Jesus Christ ! " 
 
 She could say no more, her voice failed ; but the 
 strong man bowed his head on the table and wept 
 like a child.
 
 88 The World's Workers. 
 
 But time, or at least my very limited space, would 
 fail to tell of all the good work done at Bcckenham, 
 not only by Miss Marsh, but by the whole of the large 
 rectory circle, all of whom seemed to lay out them- 
 selves and their belongings entirely for the good of 
 their fellow-creatures, among whom the cadets at 
 Addiscombe College were not forgotten. 
 
 Many an officer now growing grey remembers 
 with affection the happy Sundays on the lawn of 
 Beckenham Rectory, when the youngsters gathered 
 around the venerable Dr. Marsh, listening with rapt 
 interest to his words. 
 
 " What is the good of being young," said one of 
 the cadets, as he lingered for another smile and part- 
 ing word, " when one sees a man of eighty in better 
 spirits than the j oiliest of us } " 
 
 Miss Marsh always took these young soldiers 
 under her especial care. As I write I have before 
 me a copy of " Hedley Vicars," yellow, and stained 
 with twenty years of India, in which is the name 
 of one of those young officers to whom it was 
 given " with Catherine Marsh's kind regards and 
 best wishes." 
 
 In i860 Dr. Marsh was induced, by many con- 
 siderations, to accept the living of Beddington, Surrey. 
 His daughter continued there a somewhat similar work 
 to that carried on at Beckenham, only instead of 
 navvies there were, beside the villagers, tanners and 
 workers at the leather, snuff, and paper mills that
 
 Catherixe Marsh. 89 
 
 had grown up on the banks of the pretty river 
 Wandle. 
 
 Miss Marsh's meeting in the tannery presented a 
 remarkably picturesque scene, and these services 
 too were made channels of great blessing to very 
 many. 
 
 In busy work and in devotedly tending the declin- 
 ing age of her most fondly loved father, Catherine 
 Marsh spent four happy years at Beddington, and 
 then the inevitable end came. 
 
 On the last night of the long watching, his 
 daughter Catherine printed in large letters to catch 
 his failing sight, the words, " A pillow for my heart's 
 beloved." " God is love." (He says) " I have loved 
 thee with an everlasting love." A few hours after, 
 when the window had been thrown open and the 
 sunshine was streaming in, with serene dignity he 
 raised his hand and closed his own eyes, to draw the 
 curtain that would hide earth from his sight, and 
 leave him alone with his Saviour. 
 
 Very deeply did Miss Marsh feel the loss of that 
 father from whom she had never before been parted ; 
 and in accordance with his wish that all his letters 
 and papers should be hers, she now occupied herself 
 in writing his life, " a task/' as she says in the preface, 
 " at once most painful and most precious.'^ Whilst 
 she was thus occupied, not long after Dr. Marsh 
 was called hence, a dreadful visitation of cholera swept 
 over the east ot London, and her heart, ever ready to
 
 90 The World's Workers. 
 
 respond to the cry of the needy and the suffering, 
 impelled her to seek for and to obtain admission to 
 the wards for cholera patients. 
 
 These were opened in the London Hospital, White- 
 chapel Road, where, for the greater part of each day, 
 during the four months' prevalence of cholera. Miss 
 Marsh ministered by the bed-sides of the sick and 
 dying. She has related some of her experiences at 
 this time in a little book called " Death and Life ; or, 
 Cholera Wards and Convalescent Homes," from which 
 I give the following touching incident, as it illustrates 
 so forcibly her simple and absolute faith that God will 
 answer prayer, as well as her intense human sympathy 
 with suffering. 
 
 After a graphic description of the wards, and of 
 the cholera-stricken patients, and the devotion of the 
 chaplain, the doctors, the nurses, and other helpers, 
 she goes on : 
 
 " A young man, named William N , was 
 
 suffering veiy severely, though he firmly suppressed 
 all sign of it, his rapidly changing colour alone be- 
 traying it. ' You are in great pain, I fear.' 
 
 " ' Pain ! ' he said ; ' it is pain ! ' 
 
 " The next day the glowing face was reduced to a 
 worn and ashy paleness. By his side stood a young 
 brother, weeping bitterly. The nurse wisely remon- 
 strated with him : 
 
 '"You won't give your poor brother a chance if 
 you take on so.'
 
 Catherine Marsh. 91 
 
 " ' Oh, he'll die ! he'll die ! ' sobbed the lad ; ' there 
 is no chance for him.' 
 
 " ' You're right,' I said, ' there is no " chance " for 
 him ; he is in the hand of Almighty God. But the 
 Son of God has said, "If two of you shall agree 
 touching anything on earth, it shall be done unto you 
 of my Father which is in Heaven. ' " 
 
 " * I never heard those words before. Do you 
 think He would keep to them, now .-' ' 
 
 "'Yes, I am sure He would be as good as His 
 word ; and will raise your brother up again if He 
 can see it to be best for him. Come, then ; if you 
 will be one of those " two," I will be the other.' 
 
 " ' No ! would ye ? ' and the young face brightened 
 through its tears. 
 
 " So we pleaded it together, as we stood side by 
 side. 
 
 " The next day William had a faint colour in his 
 cheeks again. The nurse said he had called for some 
 beef-tea soon after I had left, saying, ' We must give 
 the lady's prayers all the chance we can, nurse, or it 
 won't be fair upon her.' She noticed that he * took 
 heart again from that moment.' 
 
 " On the following Monday he met me in the en- 
 trance-hall of the Hospital, accompanied by his wife 
 and that young brother, in great joy and thankfulness 
 for his spared life. Shaking my hand heartily, he 
 said, ' We shall never doubt now about God being as 
 good as His word.' "
 
 92 The World's Workers. 
 
 Only those who have heard Miss Marsh speak and 
 pray can fully understand the helpful power of her 
 presence among such scenes of agony. Her work 
 among the sufferers was, however, not confined to 
 the sick and dying. As soon as patients began to 
 recover she felt very strongly the need of getting 
 them away from the terrible hospital, either to the 
 fresh country or to the sea-side. 
 
 An unasked for hundred pounds was sent to her 
 for the benefit of the convalescents, and in three days 
 Miss Marsh had a block of country cottages furnished 
 and ready for their inmates' use. Great, indeed, was 
 the joy of the poor patients, as, amid the shouts of a 
 large crowd of sympathising friends, they were driven 
 off in an open van to the Essex cottages, " instead of," 
 as they said themselves, " going in the dead cart to 
 the cemetery." 
 
 The cottages were so great a success, and the 
 sufferers recovered so quickly, that Miss Marsh deter- 
 mined to make a Convalescent Home for them at 
 Blackrock, Brighton. Happily, the cholera dis- 
 appeared, but Blackrock Home still continues to 
 receive patients from the poor districts of London. 
 
 Some thousands of sufferers have enjoyed that 
 hospital home, and in the great majority of cases 
 recoveries have been both rapid and complete. The 
 sea, which many of them had never before seen, 
 made a deep impression on some of the patients. 
 The most thoughtful care provides not only for the
 
 Catherine Marsh. 93 
 
 actual wants but for the pleasure of the inmates. 
 And when, as has occasionally happened, patients 
 have been sent there too far gone for cure, all that 
 could be done to soothe their last hours has been 
 provided. A wife or mother, a husband or child, 
 has been welcomed, free of expense, to help in 
 nursing and watching the sufferer, and the dying 
 eyes have been, in most cases, led, by the blessing of 
 God, to rest upon a living Saviour ; and in the peace 
 of God which passeth all understanding, one after 
 another has fallen asleep. 
 
 Another important work arose out of the cholera 
 epidemic. Many of the poor dying creatures in the 
 London Hospital were terribly anxious about their 
 children, whom they were leaving without protection. 
 The thought of their children's fate was too often the 
 bitterest part of their most bitter pain. How could it 
 be otherwise ? How could they 
 
 " See their orphans, and not dread the grave ?" 
 
 " Who is to take care of my children ? " they cried. 
 And Miss Marsh could not help answering, " I will ; 
 I'll take care of them." 
 
 In this way seventy-seven forlorn little beings 
 were committed to her care. 
 
 Her sister, Mrs. Chalmers, at once arranged an 
 orphanage at Beckenham for them, in a roomy, old- 
 fashioned house, supplemented by an iron room. 
 
 The orphans were brought up as much as possible
 
 94 ^^^ World's JVoRfirENs. 
 
 on the family system. The boys and girls were taught 
 to help each other, the boys doing such things as 
 cleaning the girls' boots, and the girls mending the 
 boys' socks and clothes. " The sunshiny happiness of 
 their daily life in the Home," writes Miss Marsh six 
 years after its establishment, " has even surpassed our 
 hopes." 
 
 But "sunshiny happiness " is one of Miss Marsh's 
 peculiarities, added to which she has the gift of in- 
 fusing a good deal of the same sort of happiness 
 into others. 
 
 When Mr. Chalmers left Bcckenham for Noninsr- 
 
 o 
 
 ton, the orphanage was removed there. By that time 
 several of the children had been placed out in service; 
 and as it was not intended to add to the number, the 
 iron house, which had been only a part of the Becken- 
 ham establishment, was large enough, and this was 
 re-erected in the grounds of Nonington Rectory until 
 by degrees all the orphans were provided for. 
 
 •T* 'T^ '1^ 'l^ JjC 
 
 Little did I think when I began this sketch that I 
 was again to have the privilege of hearing Miss Marsh 
 speak ; but so it has been ordered. 
 
 More than this, I have even seen her the centre of 
 love and reverence in a sweet home where the sacred 
 teaching of the Bible and of the Divine Master 
 penetrates each simple action of daily life through 
 and through. 
 
 Since her father's death, Miss Marsh has lived with
 
 Catherine Marsh. 95 
 
 one of her nieces, the wife of a clergyman now the 
 rector of a Norfolk parish. When I saw her she had 
 just returned from London, where she had been say- 
 ing farewell and giving Testaments to many hundreds 
 of our soldiers who were leaving for Egypt, the youth 
 of some of whom had quite gone to her heart. 
 
 On Easter Monday, 1885, a large tea party was 
 given by her to about two hundred farm labourers, 
 and here I again heard Miss Marsh address an 
 audience. Years had told in some measure even on 
 her, but her heart seemed as young as ever ; she was 
 still as striking an individuality as in the old navvy 
 day. Rows and rows of weather-beaten faces turned 
 to her as if spellbound as to them also she told in 
 that way that is so quite her own, how " God so loved 
 the world." 
 
 A story of a navvy's happy death I will try to give 
 you ; but it is quite impossible to describe the graphic 
 power of Miss Marsh's own narrative. 
 
 " Many years after I had left Beckenham," she said, 
 "I returned one day for a visit. As soon as I reached 
 the rectory door my sister said to me : ' One of your 
 old navvies is dying of consumption, and wants to see 
 you.'' I went off at once. When I entered the room 
 I exclaimed : 
 
 " ' Oh, James Green, how pleased I am to see you 
 again ! But so sorry to find you so ill.' 
 
 " ' There,' cried the man, ' there ! I knew you'd 
 know my name ! I said you would 1 '
 
 g6 The World's Workers. 
 
 " ' Of course ! I remember all about you ;' and so I 
 did, for this was the man who had walked forty miles 
 to Beckenham, when he heard that he had been 
 prayed for by name ; and when he heard, from the 
 corner where he had concealed himself, that it was 
 perfectly true, his heart seemed melted with gratitude. 
 
 " In a few minutes I found that James was not 
 happy. * I can't understand it, and I can't see how 
 God lets this be ; here am I, a skilled workman, and 
 getting on well and making my wife happy, struck 
 down for death, while there's a lot of old people in 
 workhouses, and such-like, no comfort to themselves 
 and a burden to others, that go living on, whilst here's 
 an end of all my happiness ; can tJiat be right ? ' 
 
 "' But, James,' I said, ^is it an end of all your 
 happiness ? ' 
 
 "'Well,' he replied rather sadly, 'it might be 
 different if I was quite sure I was going to heaven ; 
 but I am not. Though I am not a bad fellow like 
 some, but now and again I have taken a drop too 
 much, and / know that's sin ; and I haven't gone to 
 church regular, or kept Sunday as I should, and / 
 know that's sin.' 
 
 " I spoke of Christ's death for us, and read i John i.: 
 ' If we confess our sins. He is faithful and just to forgive 
 us our sins,' when he stopped me short by saying, 
 
 " ' That'll do.' 
 
 " Thinking he felt tired, I only said, ' Then good- 
 bye, James j I will come again as soon as I can,' and
 
 Catiirrine Marsh. 97 
 
 left him. The next day was Sunday, and as I could 
 not walk so far, a young friend, an Addisconibe 
 cadet, went to enquire for James for me. He 
 brought word that James wanted me to go as soon 
 as possible on Monday, adding that he said he ' had 
 a secret that I must hear before any one else ; but,' 
 put in my friend, ' it is a very open secret, for it is 
 flashing all over his face.' 
 
 " And so it was ; his worn features were shining 
 with joy when I saw him the next morning. ' I told 
 you that would do,' was his greeting, ' and it did! 
 
 "'Oh, James, I thought you meant I had read 
 enough.' 
 
 " ' Now, did you ? ' said he ; ' no, no, I meant this : 
 if God is faitJiful to forgive us our sins, that's a great 
 thing ; \iw\.just, that's more wonderful still, and means 
 He'll do it at once ; for no honourable man even would 
 delay to do a justice, how much more God ! Then I 
 thought, how is it that He is just to forgive me my 
 sins ? and I remembered you told me that Christ had 
 paid the price, so it wouldn't be just to want it paid 
 twice over. So now I am quite happy, and not afraid 
 to die.' 
 
 " After that he used to tell all who came to see 
 him of the way to have their sins forgiven. Then his 
 dying night came, and his wife and sister were watch- 
 ing beside him, when he exclaimed, 
 
 " ' What's that beautiful light in the corner t Why, 
 there's mother in it — dear mother, who died blessing 
 
 G
 
 gS The World's Workers. 
 
 me »vhen I was but seven year old. Dear mother, 
 how pretty she looks ! Yes, I'll come to you, mother ;' 
 then after a moment's pause, ' I don't see mother's 
 light now, but there's another more beautiful, and i 
 see a face ; it's as innocent as a babe's, and yet it's like 
 God. Why, it's the Lord Jesus. Oh, blessed Saviour, 
 how kind to come for me ! Yes, Tm ready to go with 
 you,' and leaning back on his pillow he went away." 
 
 This narrative gives a good idea of the manner in 
 which Miss Marsh can use a text of Scripture ; but 
 no written words can possibly convey to those who 
 have not heard her speak what a text — a well-known 
 text that has become to us, perhaps, like a much used 
 coin, with the impression on it all but worn smooth — 
 can become. The Divine image and superscription grow 
 firm and clear once more, and the pure gold shines 
 as if " fire new from the mint " of the Word of God. 
 
 It is not only when addressing an eager and 
 crowded audience that she shows this gift in handling 
 the Word of Life, but always ; a text from her lips, 
 whenever heard, is a power indeed. 
 
 Is not this a power which even ordinary Christians 
 may cultivate in themselves, and which would doubt- 
 less be the possession of many if only they had the 
 same absolute faith in the words they utter ? 
 
 Long may Miss Marsh be spared to make the 
 Divine Message so clear and plain. 
 
 (Our Portrait is from a Photograph by Elliott and Fry, Lo/iJon.)
 
 MRS. RANYARD ("L.N. R."). 
 
 BETWEEN the gardens of the Thames Embank- 
 ment and the Strand there stands, raised on 
 arches, a tall row of fine houses well known to 
 Londoners as Adclphi Terrace. From this terrace 
 there is a view unique in all the world. Let us enter 
 No. 2, the Mother House or Centre of the London 
 Bible and Domestic Female Mission, and go upstairs 
 to one of the top rooms, just opposite Cleopatra's 
 Needle, and there look out of an open window. 
 
 We will suppose it is a fme clear day in summer. 
 Below us, beyond the garden, is the great crowded 
 Thames, stretching in a noble bend from Lambeth 
 Palace to where far down stream it is lost to sight near 
 Cannon Street Bridge. How full of life it is! There 
 is a fascination about the scene that rivets one to the 
 window 1 There to the right is the huge railway bridge 
 and station of Charing Cross, with its many trains and 
 its white sun-lighted vapour. Then there are the 
 towers of Westminster beyond ; the great sweep of 
 river and gardens and Surrey shore ; the Temple, St. 
 Paul's, the aggressive roof of Cannon Street Station, 
 the City, the bridges ; the swift steam-boats darting
 
 lOO The World's Workers. 
 
 by the slow barges, the never-ceasing play of rippling 
 water, the constant traffic on the broad Embankment ; 
 far off on the distant hills is the dim outline of the 
 Crystal Palace ; and in the extreme east the turrets of 
 the Tower. One might spend an hour there, and not 
 be weary of that marvellous scene. 
 
 But we must leave the window, and just glance 
 through the house. Is it Friday ? Then there are 
 Bible-women coming and going. Is it Tuesday? 
 Then the stairs and large upper room are filled with 
 Bible-nurses bringing in their empty bags and taking 
 out others full of medical stores for the poor people 
 among whom they work. 
 
 Here there is a cupboard full of Bibles or parts of 
 Bibles. Portions at one penny, and Family Bibles 
 running as high as thirty shillings, all to be paid for a 
 penny at a time. Look at that large-print two-shil- 
 ling Bible, the greatest favourite of all — the Bible- 
 woman will have to call twenty-four times at the 
 buyer's house before it is all paid for. Let us hope 
 that by that time buyer and seller will be fast 
 friends. In the year 1884 the Bible-women sold 
 nearly twelve thousand Bibles or parts of Bibles, and 
 all were paid for in pennies. Find the value one 
 single text may be to one single soul, multiply by all 
 the texts in the Bible, then multiply the Bible by 
 twelve thousand, add to this the personal influence 
 of an earnest Christian woman, and when you have 
 finished this sum you may be able to arrive at
 
 IIrs. Ranyard {"L.N.R:'). iot 
 
 some faint idea of the value of the Biblc-vvomcn's 
 work. 
 
 Near this Bible-cupboard is a store-room, in which 
 an enthusiastic housekeeper would positively revel. 
 There are presses full of endless packages of oatmeal, 
 sugar, cereal food, lint, cotton-wool, lotions, oil-silk, 
 and the tins in which the nurses carry the cooked 
 food. On the mantelpiece is the neatest possible 
 little machine for rolling bandages. There are 
 presses full of garments, new and old, of all sorts 
 and sizes, numberless little new bundles waiting for 
 numberless little new babies, men's suits, women's 
 clothes, children's clothes. Nurses and Bible-women 
 are always taking them out to those who need them 
 so dreadfully, and kind people are always sending 
 others in. 
 
 Downstairs in the large council-room a few ladies 
 are managing the affairs of the Mission. You see 
 they form a little group around one lady who is 
 reading reports aloud to them. On the wall above 
 the reader's chair hangs the portrait of the foundress, 
 the late Mrs. Ranyard, and the kindly, penetrating 
 eyes of that motherly face still look down lovingly 
 on those who are carrying on the good work she began. 
 
 Invisible persons like ourselves may gaze at that 
 picture without disturbing any one. 
 
 The portrait was taken late in Mrs. Ranyard's 
 life, but it is exceedingly characteristic. She was 
 extremely kind and extremely firm. You see both
 
 102 The Worlds Workers. 
 
 qualities in the keen, deep-set eyes, that seem to 
 judge and weigh and penetrate, but never pierce ; in 
 the shrewd, almost humorous expression of the 
 mouth ; in the pleasant smile. How beloved that 
 face was in life, and how tenderly regretted now ! 
 Those who worked with her can scarcely yet say 
 calmly, " I can't tell you what she was like, but I 
 have her in my heart ! Oh, she was kind — kind — 
 kind ! She was unique, there was never any one like 
 her!" 
 
 These are the sort of answers, spoken with tears 
 welling up in the eyes, that tell more than words 
 how much she is missed, when one tries to find out 
 what manner of woman Mrs. Ranyard was. 
 
 ■X- 7?- * * * 
 
 Ellen Henrietta White — this was ]\Irs. Ranyard's 
 maiden name — was born at Nine Elms in 1809, and was 
 the eldest of a large family of brothers and sisters. 
 In those days Nine Elms was a comparatively quiet 
 river-side place. Now it is entirely occupied by a 
 gigantic goods-station, h^llcn White's parents were 
 both of them most excellent people, but very dis- 
 similar in character. The father was an excep- 
 tionally kind and gentle man, the mother kind also, 
 but a most rigid maintainer of discipline. Both were 
 very energetic in their different ways, and their many 
 children took after both of them. 
 
 Mr. White was a prosperous business man, and 
 he and his wife looked well to the education of their
 
 Mrs. Ranyard (" L. N. /?."). 103 
 
 children, giving- them such culture as was then to be 
 had, but training them with especial care in the 
 knowledge of the Scriptures and of the " Shorter 
 Catechism." 
 
 In such an atmosphere Ellen White early de- 
 veloped a taste for books and art, and a passionate 
 longing for bringing out the best of what she felt 
 was in her. Her brothers and sisters still remember 
 her as "'the good elder sister," and "good" not only 
 in the way of kindness, although she was always 
 their comforter in their troubles, but as their inspirer, 
 their helper in their strivings after knowledge, and in 
 the development of their mental and spiritual powers. 
 
 Beyond, however, this vague striving after self- 
 improvement, Ellen White does not appear to have 
 arrived at any definite idea of giving herself up to 
 any particular form of usefulness. When she was 
 sixteen or thereabout, in 1826, the future of her 
 coming life had thrown no shadow upon her. Then 
 one of those epoch-making events that mark the 
 beginning of a new era in the chronology of a life 
 took place. 
 
 She has left but few notes of her history behind 
 her, but this event she has recorded at some length. 
 It shall be given in her own words. It is headed : — 
 
 THE BEGINNING OF MY LIFE-WORK. 
 
 "My mission history begins when, as a girl of 
 sixteen, I was taken by my parents to a Bible-
 
 104 The World's Workers. 
 
 meeting at Wanstead. We were to stay with the 
 family who entertained the speakers, in which there 
 were several daughters, one of whom, Elizabeth 
 Saunders, was at this time about to part with a dear 
 friend, to whom she owed her conversion. They had 
 been next-door neighbours, and when this dear 
 friend had left for Manchester, Elizabeth, a gentle 
 and loving soul, felt that she should stand alone in 
 her family, who were at that time unconverted. Her 
 heart seemed half-broken, and I remember that an 
 elder friend tried to comfort her with these lines : 
 
 God nothing does, nor suffers to be done, 
 But thou wouldst do thyself if thou couldst see 
 The end of all things here as well as He.' 
 
 'o- 
 
 " I felt much for their sorrow, and so did my 
 mother, and she entreated Mrs. Saunders to let 
 Elizabeth return home with us for a little change. 
 The two friends had been the ' evangelists ' of their 
 village, and the one left behind was in delicate health 
 and low spirits. Her parents thought she had 
 exerted herself too much, and it was understood 
 that she was to come to us for rest. There was, 
 however, no rest for her but in bringing souls to 
 Jesus. 
 
 " One morning I sat at a table drawing [until 
 her hfe's end Ellen White never lost her love for 
 drawing and painting ; but art schools where girls 
 could study were unknown in those pre-South
 
 Mrs. Ranyard {"L.N.R."). 105 
 
 Kensingtonian times, so the poor things had to do 
 the best they could without them, and that best was 
 not very much after all] ; wc were alone, and Eli/.abcth 
 said to me : 
 
 " ' Ellen, dear, have you ever thought what you 
 will do with your life?' 
 
 " ' Do with my life ? ' I answered ; ' well, I hope I 
 shall go on cultivating my mind and my faculties ; 
 that is all I have thought about yet.' 
 
 " ' Yes ; but have you thought that this cultiva- 
 tion is to enable you the better to live for others, not 
 for yourself, and that you must live to do something 
 in God's service ? ' 
 
 " ' Perhaps you mean in a Sunday school ? My 
 mother will not let me teach there. She says such 
 work is only for converted people, and I am not 
 converted. I like worldly reading, such as the 
 Literary Gazette, and Lord Byron's poetry [Byron 
 was then the idol of nearly everybody, and especially 
 of all the jF^//7z^ bodies and minds], and I wish to see 
 more of the world before I leave it, especially of its 
 books.' 
 
 " ' Then you mean to leave it some time ? I 
 wonder what, my dear, you know about the Best 
 of Books 1 do you love your Bible at all ? ' 
 
 " * I have read it through three times ; I seem to 
 know all about it. Yes, certainly I love it ; but one 
 cannot always be reading one's Bible.' 
 
 " ' I suppose you never have thought how many
 
 io6 The World's Workers. 
 
 of the poor people who live in the streets not far from 
 you have no Bible to read ? ' 
 
 " I answered, ' No, I never thought of that, but I 
 liked }'our Bible meeting very much the other day at 
 Wanstead.' 
 
 " ' Would you like to leave your painting this 
 morning, and go with me to find out how many want 
 a Bible ? ' 
 
 " ' Yes, I should like to go anywhere with you, 
 but it would be like Sunday-school, and I suppose my 
 mother would not approve ; and she may also say 
 that you came here to rest yourself from all you do 
 at home.' 
 
 " This dear Elizabeth, however, had set her 
 heart on the exploring walk, and she obtained my 
 mother's consent under protest, I remember, for she 
 looked anything but fit for the exertion, and was 
 made to take ^^% and wine as a fortifier before going 
 out. So we set forth, she with a Bible in her hand 
 and a prayer in her heart, and in her pocket a pencil 
 and a little book, a page or two of which she had 
 been ruling in squares while I had been painting by 
 her side. Oh ! that last walk in her lovely, holy, 
 gentle life ! It led her to her death, but me, at that 
 unknown cost, to life eternal. She certainly gave 
 prudence to the winds. We must have been out 
 three hours, and we found the people in thirty-five 
 houses on that day without a Bible. 
 
 " I came home, having seen for the first time how
 
 Mns. Ranyard ("Z. .V. /v\"). 107 
 
 the poor live ; their ignorance, their dirt, their smells 
 — for we went upstairs to more than one sick-room ; 
 and I heard my friend, in a way that I had never 
 heard before (though religiously brought up), tell the 
 good news of the love of Jesus to the consumptive 
 and the dying. She spoke to them, but the Spirit of 
 God carried the message home to me. 
 
 " We finished our walk by a talk with an old 
 woman in a filthy shop, who sold coals and greens, 
 and there I never shall forget the odour ; and the 
 old woman was deaf and rude ; but we actually 
 turned homewards with thirty-five pence in our bag, 
 and as many names in our collecting book, and as 
 we reached our gate I saw that Elizabeth could 
 scarcely stand. 
 
 " She asked leave to go up to her room, and very 
 much to my mother's chagrin was unable to come 
 down to dinner. She was too tired to talk any more 
 that day, and I remember nothing more that after- 
 noon except that when I went to bed at night I took up 
 my Bible to read my usual chapter with a new feeling 
 for it, and a new light upon it from all I had seen 
 and heard that day, and I thought I would begin the 
 Book over again for Elizabeth's sake ; and as I read 
 * Let there be light,' from that hour there was light 
 upon its pages never seen before, for my hard young 
 heart was softened, and a quiet new affection drawn 
 out to this new and gentle friend. 
 
 " But in that walk we had both taken fever : mine
 
 io8 The World's Workers. 
 
 proved to be bilious, and hers turned to typhus, and 
 she almost immediately returned home. Before her 
 departure, which was to me a great sorrow, she said 
 she should like me to read the life of Henry Martyn 
 with her, twelve pages a day, to which I gladly 
 agreed ; but by the time I had finished it, my new 
 friend and teacher was on earth no more. 
 
 " This great grief fixed my resolves. When I 
 recovered, I was allowed, to my own surprise, to go 
 again to the poor people, explain m}- absence, and 
 once more collect the pence, which, when they 
 amounted to £6, were taken into the Ladies' Bible 
 Committee Meeting at Kennington, of which my 
 grandmother, my father's mother, was at that time 
 president. 
 
 " I became in time its minute secretary and cash 
 secretary ; always, however, retaining the charge of 
 my own district, which had become to me sacred 
 ground, and always gladly finding time to canvass 
 other districts with any new ladies who required 
 help, which I considered was the duty of an active 
 secretary. 
 
 " I remember thinking that the Bible-work was 
 the one work to which I had been called by God, 
 and to which I must keep faithful as one who had 
 been ' baptised for the dead.' " 
 
 Here the narrative ends. Ellen White was six- 
 teen when this crisis of her life took place ; she 
 was over forty before she wrote " The Book and its
 
 Mas. Ranyard {''L.N.R:'). 109 
 
 Story ; " and forty-eight before what was indeed to 
 be her great life-work was revealed to her. Remember 
 this, young men and maidens, who are bemoaning the 
 hard fate that gives you so little success at nineteen. 
 As for Ellen White, she turned as if by a spiritual 
 instinct towards the road, far, far along which, and 
 all hidden and even unsuspected by her, lay Ellen 
 Ranyard's Bible Woman's Mission. 
 
 Many circumstances fostered her devotion to the 
 Book. She became intimate with a large circle of 
 earnest cultivated Christians, among them a man most 
 mighty in the Scriptures, Charles Nice Davies. 
 
 Under Mr. Davies' practical teaching, Ellen White 
 grew more and more to enjoy the Bible, and devoted 
 much time both to the reading of the Book her- 
 self, and in trying to get others to do so. The Book 
 became to her the very joy of her heart ; she was 
 eager that what it was to her it should become to 
 others. 
 
 Her love for all who loved the Bible grew natur- 
 ally with her growing love for the Sacred Word itself, 
 and her loyalty for the Bible Society, which had never 
 flagged since the death of her " dear Elizabeth," be- 
 came more and more pronounced. 
 
 Hers was indeed a noble, broad-souled nature. 
 She was eminently a Catholic Christian, having 
 wide sympathies with all who love and serve Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
 In after-life this firm grip of Bible Society prin-
 
 no The World's Workers. 
 
 ciples was of the greatest value to her, and gave its 
 distinctive feature to her mission. It enabled her to 
 work, leaning to no party, but simply striving to lead 
 souls into the fold of the Good Shepherd. Ellen 
 White had a great love for history and archaeology, 
 as well as for art and versification. Mr. (afterwards 
 Sir Henry) Layard's discoveries aroused this faculty 
 very vigorously. When the gigantic forms that had 
 so long guarded the buried gateways of buried palaces 
 were brought to England and set up in our own 
 museums, what a thrill they sent through those who 
 regarded them as " stones crying out," messengers 
 from God sent to convince an unbelieving age ! And 
 few were more thrilled by them than was Ellen 
 W^iite. 
 
 But time had been going by. Her father had left 
 the suburbs of London and settled at Swanscombe, 
 between Gravcsend and Dartford, beside a wider, 
 clearer Thames than London's water-way. Ellen 
 White, always an enthusiastic lover of Nature, did 
 not fail to render due homage to Father Thames. 
 He, " the lake-like river," comes into her verses as 
 naturally as do her many brothers and sisters and her 
 parents. Here, at Swanscombe, in a happy, pros- 
 perous home, the large family grew up, and gradually 
 dispersed. 
 
 Ellen, the good, bright, elder sister, wrote little 
 poems about their marriages, or their other goings 
 away. She had a very happy influence over them,
 
 Mas. Ranyard {" L. iV. /?."). 1 1 1 
 
 seeking always first of all their souls' good, leading 
 them to love God, the Bible, Nature, all fair, good 
 things, and poetry, especially Wordsworth's. 
 
 P^or Wordsworth she had an extraordinary en- 
 thusiasm. The dream of her life was to see him 
 and speak to him. She knew a large part of his 
 poems by heart, and what is more, so wrought upon 
 others of her family, that they too learned many of 
 them. Years afterwards she saw the great master, 
 and conversed with him. 
 
 It was not, however, as Ellen White that she was 
 destined to be known to the world. She followed the 
 example of other members of her family, and married 
 Mr. Benjamin Ranyard ; but unlike the others, she had 
 no need to leave Swanscombe. She was, she says, 
 
 " To a cot I call my own, 
 Transplanted harp and all ; " 
 
 yet her new home was quite close to her parents' 
 abode. 
 
 She was very busy there writing verses to her 
 children as they came, and many a verse of touching 
 sympathy with friends departed. Several of these 
 poems were afterwards collected and published under 
 the title "Leaves from Life," and the "Border Land, 
 and other Poems." She was already holding mothers* 
 meetings amongst the country poor, and her time was 
 filled up with social duties and the education of her 
 children. It was not till 1852 that it was suggested
 
 112 The World's Workers. 
 
 to her that she should write "The Book and its 
 Story." 
 
 Some time before, as a girl of twenty, she had 
 given the world a few of her experiences as a Bible 
 collector. The little book had found a ready sale 
 and many readers. The jubilee of the British and 
 Foreign Bible Society was approaching ; Mrs. 
 Ranyard was already well known and greatly valued 
 by the jubilee secretary, the Rev. T. Phillips, who 
 suggested to her that she should write a jubilee 
 volume, telling the Story of the Book and the Story 
 of the Society. 
 
 The task involved long and patient labour and 
 much reading ; but it was one for which she was very 
 well qualified by many years of daily study and of 
 deepest love for the Book itself. She at length 
 succeeded in putting that story so vividly and yet so 
 simply before her readers that it charmed many of 
 them like a romance. 
 
 The reading of " The Book and its Story " marks a 
 new era in many a life now growing old, but young 
 and open to strong impression in 1853, when the 
 Bible Society held its jubilee. Thousands, tens of 
 thousands of homes that book entered to go no more 
 out for ever, to stay there a beloved and honoured 
 friend of the family. Its circulation was enormous. 
 
 This literary success, however, was not allowed to 
 disturb the even tenor of Mrs. Ranyard's life. She 
 hated notoriety ; any sort of publicity was incon-
 
 Mrs. Ranyard {" L. N. R."). 113 
 
 sistent with her ideas of what was feminine. So for 
 many years she stayed in her quiet river-side valley, 
 quite engrossed with her womanly cares, her books, 
 babies, and Bible collecting, the guiding of her house- 
 hold, and the comforting of her ageing parents. 
 
 In those long years, hidden away from all except 
 her own circle, she learned in her own dealings with 
 her neighbours what a Bible-woman's work should 
 be ; in those long years God was training her day by 
 day for the work He was preparing for her. Little 
 she knew for what purpose the Divine Instructor 
 was fitting her. But as maiden, as wife, as mother, 
 ever since that day in her girlhood when she and 
 Elizabeth Saunders had taken that never-to-be-for- 
 gotten walk, Bible-work, in one form or another, but 
 chiefly and continuously in making penny collections 
 among the poor, had been the work to which she 
 felt she had been set apart ; and from it she never 
 swerved. 
 
 At length there came a time when she and her 
 Mission were to meet. Her boys and girls were 
 growing up, and needed a better education than 
 could be obtained for them in the country. So she 
 and her husband resolved to leave their quiet home 
 and come to London. 
 
 They came ; they took a house destined to be- 
 come of historic interest to the friends of a then 
 unthought-of agency for good, a house known now 
 to many thousands by its mission name, " Huntejr 
 
 H
 
 114 ^^^ World's Workers. 
 
 Street." Little she thought, when she first wrote 
 her new address, what it would one day grow to 
 mean. 
 
 It was in June, 1857, that Mrs. Ranyard, accom- 
 panied by a retired physician, who had known Lon- 
 don well during his early practice, ventured to take 
 her first walk in the terrible Seven Dials, St. Giles', 
 a locality bad enough even now, in spite of model 
 blocks, schools, mission halls, and new streets, but 
 much worse in those days. Mrs. Ranyard was smit- 
 ten with horror. Here are a few sentences from 
 her own description of the dismal purlieus of St. 
 Giles'. 
 
 " An oppressive, fusty smell assails us as we pass 
 along by the old clothes shops. The dwellers in the 
 cellars beneath the shops are come up this afternoon 
 to breathe the air, the hot and fetid air. The streets 
 are filled with loiterers and loungers. Lazy, dirty 
 women are exhibiting to one another some article of 
 shabby finery, newly revived, which they have just 
 bought. We search in vain among the ragged, sallow 
 children for a bright face or a clean pinafore. There 
 is not a true child-face among them all ; nothing 
 speaks of God or Nature but one basket of flowers 
 with which a man happens to be turning the corner 
 of the street. 
 
 " Some of the dingy windows of those upper floors 
 are open ; and, oh, what dirty, haggard forms are 
 peering out. Many a pane is stufled with rags, and
 
 Mrs. Ranyard {" L. N. R."). 115 
 
 all around bespeaks a want of light and air and 
 water. We looked up the dark courts and alleys, 
 which had poured forth those squalid children, and 
 which link the seven streets together, and would fain 
 have entered, but there was a something about them 
 which seemed to say, ' Seek no farther, or you may 
 never return.'" 
 
 To most persons, after such a glimpse of low Lon- 
 don, the most pressing question would be : " How 
 do these dingy swarms of human beings manage to 
 live at all ? " But to Mrs. Ranyard's mind there 
 occurred what was to her a still more urgent inquiry : 
 " How are these people in their countless courts and 
 alleys supplied with the Bible ? " 
 
 She went to Mr. M'Cree, the well-known missionary 
 of St. Giles', and from him she heard that although, 
 thanks to Mr. Thorold, then the Rector of St. Giles' 
 (now Bishop of Rochester and one of the Council of 
 the Bible-woman's Mission), Bibles could be had by 
 penny subscriptions at the church, yet only the decent 
 poor availed themselves of this opportunity. 
 
 Mrs. Ranyard felt that no lady, however brave, 
 could be of use among those sunken people ; but guided 
 by her own experience as a Bible collector, she asked 
 Mr. M'Cree if he knew a good, poor woman who 
 would venture wnth a bag of Bibles into every room, 
 as a paid agent for the Bible Society, and who would 
 give a faithful account of her trust. 
 
 For all these long years Mrs. Ranyard had been
 
 ii6 The World's WoRKEKb. 
 
 in training for the mission which was at that very 
 moment just within her reach. 
 
 Let us now leave Mrs. Ranyard for a few minutes 
 while we briefly trace the steps by which " Marian 
 B " became the first Bible-woman. 
 
 Marian's parents were in a tolerably respectable 
 position when she was born, but her father was a 
 drunkard, broke his wife's heart, and gradually sank 
 until he and his two daughters were reduced to 
 dwell in a low lodging-house in St. Giles'. He, 
 however, soon died, leaving Marian and her little 
 five-year old sister to get on the best they could. 
 The poor young things had to live in the midst of 
 fearful vice, but, as if by a miracle, they escaped 
 uninjured, although many a night they had to spend 
 on the stairs or the doorsteps to avoid the scenes 
 that were within. 
 
 An old man, a fellow-lodger, kind-hearted, although 
 an atheist, took pity on Marian, and taught her to 
 write a little, but told her never to read the Bible. 
 " It is full of lies," he used to say ; " you have 
 only to look round you in St. Giles' to sec there is 
 no God." 
 
 But Marian had a hungry little mind ; she 
 managed to pick up reading and knitting by con- 
 tinual gazing in at shop-windows. She never went 
 to any sort of school, and at eighteen married a man 
 as poor as herself When they went to church to be 
 married she had neither shoes nor stockings, and he
 
 Mrs. Ranyard {'' L. N. R."). 117 
 
 had no coat. Her husband, however, poor as he was, 
 was sober, and from that time siic knew what it was 
 to have a "home," although that home was humble 
 indeed. 
 
 On the nth of February, 1853, four years before 
 Mrs. Ranyard heard of her, Marian was passing 
 through the streets when it came on to pour with 
 rain. She took shelter in an alley that led up to 
 the little Mission Hall in Dudley Street, where Mr. 
 M'Cree was then preaching. Hearing a voice, Marian 
 went in to listen. The address was nearly ended ; 
 but some verses quoted from the eleventh of Hebrews 
 touched Marian's heart. She knew that the book 
 always used in mission halls was the Bible, and that 
 those words must be in the Bible. 
 
 When the address was over, the preacher 
 announced that a lending library had just been 
 formed, and that on the following evening books 
 would be lent to the poor. This was good news for 
 Marian. She was at the hall early, and was the first 
 applicant. She had intended to borrow " Uncle 
 Tom's Cabin," which was then creating an enormous 
 interest in every class of society, but a strong im- 
 pulse that she could not resist impelled her to ask 
 for a Bible instead. It was as if she had heard a 
 voice whispering to her, " Do not borrow Uncle Tom, 
 borrow a Bible." So she asked for one. 
 
 "A Bible!" exclaimed the missionary; "we did 
 not mean to lend Bibles ; but wait, I will fetch you
 
 iiS The World's Workers.^ 
 
 one. It is a token for good that the Book of God, 
 the Best of Books, should be the first one asked for, 
 and lent from this place." 
 
 He brought her the Bible, and asked if he should 
 call and read a chapter with her. She said respect- 
 fully, " No, sir, thank you ; we are very quiet folk, 
 my husband might not like it ; I will take the book 
 and read it for myself." 
 
 In the letter Mr. M'Cree had in his pocket when 
 Mrs. Ranyard spoke to him, Marian had written : 
 "I asked }'ou to lend me a Bible; you knew not my 
 name or residence, yet with cheerful kindness you 
 complied with that request ; and, for the first time in 
 my life, I brought a Bible into my home. That 
 Bible I still retain ; of its influence over me none but 
 its great Author can be aware ; nor of the slow but 
 certain means by which its precious truths have been 
 revealed to my hitherto benighted soul." 
 
 Marian was then eking out her husband's little 
 earnings by cutting fire-papers, or moulding wax- 
 flowers, or making bags for silversmiths, but in spite 
 of poverty and work, she found she had two or three 
 hours a day that she could spare, and in that letter 
 which was in ]\Ir. M'Cree^s pocket when Mrs. 
 Ranyard spoke to him, she had told him that she 
 had received such mercy from God that she had 
 devoted every moment of her life to prove her 
 gratitude. " I have thought over many plans," she 
 wrote, " all of which I have dismissed but one, which
 
 Mrs. Ranyard Q'L.N.R."). 119 
 
 is for me perfectly practicable ; and it is to ask your 
 co-operation in it that I presume to address you. 
 
 " During the time I was in the hospital I had 
 frequent opportunities of witnessing the utterly 
 friendless condition of many poor outcasts, the 
 plight of their persons and clothing proving their 
 need of a female hand. Now I wish to dedicate the 
 time I have to spare not so much to the decent poor, 
 who have a claim upon the sympathy of their neigh- 
 bours, but to the lost and degraded of my own sex. 
 No matter how degraded she may be, it will be 
 enough for me that she require my aid, such as 
 washing her, and repairing her garments." 
 
 This was the substance of the long letter which 
 the missionary read to Mrs. Ranyard. He said it 
 was perfectly genuine, and "like the writer when you 
 knew her." 
 
 Mrs. Ranyard was convinced that this was the 
 kind of person she sought, and that if she could carry 
 the message from God to every door, opportunities of 
 many forms of usefulness might arise. She made an 
 offer to Marian, and Marian accepted it with delight. 
 She wrote : 
 
 " I believe that grace that was able to subdue my 
 own heart will never leave me in my effort to pour 
 into the hearts of others that blessed Message. I am 
 myself too strong a proof of the power of Almighty 
 God to dare to doubt in any case the mercy which 
 broke down the strongholds of sin in me."
 
 120 The World's Workers. 
 
 To penetrate the dens of Soho and Seven Dials, 
 not to give away tickets for bread and coals, but to 
 ask people to pay for Bibles at a penny a week, would 
 have seemed a most visionary scheme to many good 
 Christians had they been told of it. But they were 
 not told of it. Very little was said to any one about 
 the attempt until its success more than justified its 
 seeming audacity. 
 
 It was indeed terrible work ; but it was also most 
 blessed. Marian, although she had lived in St. Giles' 
 for thirty-three years, soon found that its hidden 
 recesses were unknown to her. Even she, used as 
 she was to the neighbourhood, was surprised at the 
 state of things she discovered by her room to room 
 visits. Some of her earliest visits were to courts 
 where no one so much as professed to get an honest 
 living, where every one was "tarred with the same 
 brush," and a very black brush too ; where dwellings 
 were worse than the cow-houses of these days, with a 
 heap of filthy straw for a bed ; where hare and rabbit 
 skins were kept until the stench of them bred fever ; 
 where one pump or tap, with a very scanty supply of 
 water, had to serve the whole court. 
 
 Yet into these places the Bible-woman went ; 
 often repulsed, it is true, but more frequently 
 treated with respect; for the lowest, although they 
 knew nothing of the Book, had a notion it was 
 something intended to do people good. One 
 "lady with lettuces" even went so far as to make
 
 Mks. Ranyard ("L.N.R."). 121 
 
 a curtsey to Marian for the sake of the Book she 
 carried. 
 
 In only one court was she badly treated, when a 
 bucket of filth was emptied on her from an upper win- 
 dow. This at once made nearly the whole population 
 her friends. One woman took her in and wiped her 
 bonnet, and another brought water to wash her face, 
 and were afterwards among her warmest protectors. 
 
 But how about the actual sale ? Were any Bibles 
 sold after all ? At the end of the first month seventy 
 Bible subscribers were on the books. The taste then 
 was for small copies with gilt edges. Now it is for 
 the large print two-shilling Bible. Under the circum- 
 stances seventy subscribers was certainly a much 
 larger number than Mrs. Ranyard's most sanguine 
 hopes had anticipated. 
 
 This result of the first month's work cheered Mrs. 
 Ranyard exceedingly. She began to think that 
 perhaps the missing link between the very lowest 
 of our people and our upper classes had been found ; 
 she began to suspect that the Bible-woman was that 
 missing link. 
 
 Much knowledge as to how the poor live was 
 secured by Marianas visits, which were daily reported 
 to Mrs. Ranyard ; " but," says Mrs. Ranyard, " that 
 was not the first aim. The enterprise was under- 
 taken only with a deep sense that the Message from 
 God should be carried to every member of the human 
 family."
 
 122 The World's Workers. 
 
 Before the end of her second month's visiting, 
 Marian gave her now historical tea-party to eight 
 women who were her most punctual subscribers. 
 Some were buyers of hare and rabbit skins, some 
 sellers of watercresses, fruit, fish, or flowers ; but all 
 had bad husbands. Marian had chairs for five of 
 them ; the rest sat on the side of her bed. She was 
 not extravagant in providing for them, one ounce 
 of tea, half a pound of lump sugar, half a pound of 
 butter, and a quartern loaf being all that was required. 
 They all brought their new Bibles with them. Marian 
 talked to them, simply telling them what that Book 
 had done for her ; and that that was the reason she 
 was so glad to bring it to them. 
 
 It was a simple entertainment, but they were all 
 encouraged to talk about themselves, and so when 
 they parted they all declared they had never spent 
 such a happy evening before. As for Marian her- 
 self, she declared that every week's work seemed 
 happier and happier. 
 
 At the end of twenty weeks she had sold one 
 hundred and thirty Bibles and one hundred and twenty 
 Testaments, and mostly to those who would not have 
 bought them from any one else. She generally made 
 friends of her subscribers, so that she now found a 
 welcome in over two hundred rooms. 
 
 Mrs. Ranyard and her one Bible-woman soon found 
 out that many things besides Bibles were needed. 
 They sold for a halfpenny a printed recipe of a
 
 Mrs. Ranyard {''L.N.R."). 123 
 
 " nourishing soup that could be made for sixpence," 
 and they lent a saucepan to make it in. They started 
 a clothing club and a sewing meeting ; they thought 
 and planned for individual cases in all sorts of ways. 
 Thus, little by little, there grew up a Domestic as well 
 as a Bible mission. 
 
 In the simplest faith in the power of the Sword 
 of the Spirit, and with intense womanly sympathy, 
 joined to great sagacity and strong common sense, 
 Mrs. Ranyard gradually worked her way. The means 
 she used for getting at the objects of her loving care 
 were singularly well adapted for their work, and the 
 results were so satisfactory that after a few months of 
 trial, Mrs. Ranyard, who was then editing a periodical 
 called " The Book and its Mission," ventured to 
 describe her St. Giles' work in its pages. 
 
 Many of the poor creatures whom "Marian" tried 
 to help were Irish ; and an Irish friend, one of the 
 readers of Mrs. Ranyard's little magazine, was so 
 deeply interested by the account oi this poor woman's 
 devotion to her Irish, that she sent, unasked, a dona- 
 tion of ^ 5. This was the first private donation to funds 
 that have by this time amounted to very many thou- 
 sands of pounds. The Bible Society had, however, 
 given help before. 
 
 Mrs. Ranyard had a wonderlully graphic and 
 earnest way of describing the scenes among which 
 Marian worked. A large circle of readers soon 
 became intensely interested in her doings. Here and
 
 124 The World's Workers. 
 
 there those who had long grieved over the dark 
 places of London began to ask, Why not multiply 
 "Marians"? The record of the different missions 
 as they sprang up all over London fills by this time 
 many volumes. 
 
 Mrs. Ranyard soon found it advisable to entirely 
 devote her magazine to furthering her mission. She 
 called it "The Missing Link," meaning by that term 
 the Bible-woman, the missing link between the 
 poorest and the upper classes. 
 
 In our limited space it is quite impossible to give 
 even a sketch of this constantly growing work of 
 which Mrs. Ranyard was for twenty-two years the 
 great organising brain ; suffice it to say that, be- 
 ginning with one Bible-woman, there were over one 
 hundred and seventy when Mrs. Ranyard was taken 
 from them, and that these women, for Bibles and 
 clothing, had received from the very poor more than 
 i^i 30,000, a very large percentage of which would 
 inevitably have been spent in drink had not the Bible 
 and Domestic Mission diverted it from its evil course; 
 for, as one woman told Marian when she was col- 
 lecting sixpences for cheap beds, " Nineteen out of 
 twenty of those sixpences would have gone for gin," 
 to which many around responded, " Ay, that they 
 would ! " 
 
 The " Mothers' Meeting,'^ now a recognised part 
 of the weekly services of nearly every place of 
 worship, grew out of this mission. Who can tell
 
 Mrs. Ranyard (^' L. N. R."). 125 
 
 the blessing it has been to thousands of poor 
 mothers ? 
 
 For eleven years the Bible-women worked on alone, 
 but the appalling need of trained nurses for the sick 
 poor becoming more and more urgent, the Bible- 
 woman Nurse was added to the Mission Staff. 
 
 Mrs. Ranyard had to set about training her nurses 
 herself. Not without difficulty did she procure their 
 admission into the medical and surgical wards of 
 hospitals ; but she left behind her when she was 
 taken home about eighty nurses who attend the sick 
 poor in their own homes, visiting seven thousand 
 persons in the course of a year, taking with them 
 the beef-tea or cereal food it is so often impossible 
 for the patients to have properly cooked in their own 
 wretched rooms, 
 
 " Oh," they often say, " Nurse does make gruel 
 so nice and smooth ! Not lumpy like ! Made with 
 milk too ! " 
 
 These nurses are indeed a real blessing. Their re- 
 ports are most touching, and, alas ! most terribly true. 
 
 Mrs. Ranyard held the strings of the whole Mission 
 in her own hand. " I give you a good long line," she 
 used to tell her people with her pleasant humorous 
 smile, '^ but remember I've a hook at the end. I can 
 always pull you in." But while perfectly mistress of 
 the situation, she had the most profound humility, and 
 was willing to learn from the humblest worker. 
 
 She was from first to last profoundly impressed
 
 126 The World's Workers. ' 
 
 with the everlasting importance of the Word of 
 God. Her industry was wonderful. She was at work 
 by four or five in the morning while her health held 
 out ; and even during her last illness she would be 
 awake then, reading letters from the Bible-women 
 or preparing reports for her Magazine. Two great 
 sorrows fell upon her closing life. Her girls, each 
 of them, when they reached their eighteenth year, 
 were taken from her. She had looked forward so 
 much to their help and sympathy ; their young lives 
 opened with so much sweetness and promise that, 
 although she strove to resign them not only with 
 patience to God's will, but, as the elder, Edith, 
 said to her just before she died, to " rejoice in it," 
 the repeated blows left scars upon her most tender, 
 motherly heart that were never quite healed. 
 
 She wrote right up to the last. The Reading 
 Room of the British Museum was her refuge. Her 
 early love for Biblical archaeology never waned ; nor 
 indeed did any love of hers ever die out. She had 
 a tenacity of grasp for a person or a principle once 
 held that was indeed stronger than death. She had 
 a great diversity of gifts ; the most precious was 
 her strange power of winning affection, and that 
 from people of the most various kinds. She was 
 very sweet and bright and witty at home ; she had 
 the hearts of all her workers ; her sympathy, her 
 tact, her trust in them were wonderful, but no one took 
 a liberty with her. All were anxious that she should
 
 Mrs. Ran yard (" L. N. R."). 127 
 
 be satisfied and thankful when she was so. She is 
 "dear Mrs. Ranyard " still to all who survive. 
 
 As she approached her threescore years and ten, 
 her health and strength gradually failed. She toiled 
 on still "amid deepening shadows, amid weariness, 
 dimness of eye, and failing hand in the severely noble 
 temper of Christian humility, unconscious of self," 
 until at last absolute illness forced self-consciousness 
 upon her. 
 
 In the February of 1879, her seventieth year, 
 she had a severe bronchial attack, but she fought 
 through it with characteristic resolution. Her friends 
 and she herself thought she was recovering ; she 
 rose and seemed cheerful ; then the end came swiftly, 
 and her busy life on earth was over. 
 
 Great was the mourning and weeping when they 
 carried her body to its last resting-place. One present 
 writes " how they wept for her, the founder of Bible- 
 women to the poor women of London ; the friend 
 who had gathered alms for them, gifts of money, food 
 and raiment, gifts of flowers and fruit ; the friend who 
 had cared for them in their sickness and sorrow, who 
 had sent nurses to them in their own homes, the friend 
 who had cared for the souls of their poor mothers, 
 sent God's Word to them, and teachers to show the 
 way of salvation, and tell them of the love of Christ. 
 Our dear Bible teacher is dead. Her voice is hushed, 
 her pen laid aside, her loving heart still." 
 
 But her work lives — lives and grows. Its new
 
 128 The World's Workers. 
 
 home is the house in Adclphi Terrace, through the 
 windows of which one sees Cleopatra's Needle and 
 the great crowded bend of the broad-water of Thames, 
 and under the title of "Bible Work" (Cassell and 
 Compan)') the chronicles of the Mission are still 
 month by month continued. 
 
 {flur Portrait is from a Photograph by W. and A. //. Fry, Brighton^ 
 
 Prjnted bv Cassell & Companv, Limited, La Belle Sauvage, London, E.C.
 
 
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