Note 181 — Chapter X · THE POPULAR HEROINE

For the text see Bibliography B, No. 7. An article in the Quarterly Review of April 1867, entitled “The Nightingale in the East,” is “a study of the Poetry of Seven Dials.” The popular ditty about Miss Nightingale has been sung under many skies and to many audiences; never to greater effect than on Christmas Day 1870 in St. Thomas's Hospital (then in the Surrey Gardens). The nurses had arranged a Christmas treat; the children had sung hymns, and older patients had given popular songs of the day. A patient in the Accident Ward, a coal-heaver with a broken leg, then volunteered; when the words of the refrain caught the ears of the Nightingale nurses, “we dropped all work” (says one of them), “and listened intently till the song was over, all enthusiasm for our Chief.” The singer told them that he was an old soldier, and had been nursed by Miss Nightingale in the General Hospital at Balaclava.