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army in the Crimea. I've induced Palmerston to agree to a Sanitary Commission. Dr. Sutherland and Dr. Gavin will go, but I want an engineer. Will you go?'

"The whole thing now comes vividly before me. When I learned afterwards that from December to March, out of an army of 32,000 men, 11,000 had died through starvation and climate—in three months more at the same rate there would have been no British Army!

"'I'll go, my lord,' I said.

"He embraced me like a woman.

"'You shall take such powers as men never took before,' he said, and he kept his word. The Commission sailed on the following Thursday, at the end of February, landed at Constantinople on the 6th March, and the next day we went over to the great hospitals on the Asiatic side, where the men were dying at the rate of sixty and seventy a day. The wards were full of sick and dying, there was no adequate ventilation, and the area outside of the hospitals was covered with filth and the carcasses of animals. The cleansing was heavy work. On the second day of our arrival I had the upper portion of the windows broken to let ventilation into the rooms. Armenians and Greek labourers cleared away the carcasses—for the Turks would not touch them—and subsequently the hospitals were whitewashed. By midsummer our hospitals were the cleanest in Europe—so Florence Nightingale wrote home. The mortality decreased from sixty and seventy per thousand to twelve and fourteen, and went on improving. The French did nothing, although they had some palaces on the European side for their sick. They neither drained, ventilated, nor cleansed the surroundings—men, nurses, officers and doctors went down with fever—they telegraphed home for nurses and doctors; the reply was, 'there were none to spare.' Peace was absolutely necessary!"

Sir Robert Rawlinson.
From a Photo. by Elliott & Fry.

Sir Robert referred to all this very quietly, but the value of this work will never be estimated or known. Sir Colin Campbell—afterwards Lord Clyde—who led the Highland brigade at the Battle of the Alma—called him the "Inquisitor General," a compliment, indeed; and to-day the veteran field-marshal, Lord William Paulet, never meets him without gripping his hand and exclaiming: "I'm glad to see you, Rawlinson—had it not been for you I shouldn't be here to-day."

The wound from the cannon ball was the cause of Mr. Rawlinson's return home from the Crimea, but he continued to act until the end of the war. The late Emperor of Germany, Prince Bismarck, and Count Moltke have all acknowledged his services in sanitary matters. In 1864 Lord Palmerston made him a C.B., in 1885 Mr. Gladstone recommended him for Knighthood, and in 1889 Lord Salisbury for a K.C.B. Sir Robert has served on three Royal Commissions; waterworks have been constructed under his directions in Hong Kong—the name Hong Kong curiously enough means 'fragrant streams'—and Singapore; and Sir Robert conceived and established a system of main sewerage which has had not a little to do with the health of the people.

Then as we sat together by the window opening on to the green lawn we talked of many a famous man Sir Robert had