A SOVEREIGN NURSE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXII, Issue 7222, 10 January 1885, Page 2 (Supplement)

A SOVEREIGN NURSE.

If a dire scourge visits England shall wo' see repeated the example of unpretending heroism given to our royal family by neighboring potentates? Will the house of Hanover, emulate the old house of Savoy, or even the ' courage of the imperial parvenu, Eugenie? Will Queen Victoria, from the safe seclusion of Balmoral or Osborne, limit her pious ministrations to the sending of extra copies of her Highland books to the cholera-stricken patients as a potent opiate to dull their pain, as in the of the wounded Egyptian soldiers at Netley Hospital, or will she from her preserves give them an additional brace of grouse, or from her larder li heavier baron of beef ? We scarcely doubt that, but we dare not hope to see her shaking hands with the dying and imparting by word and touch comfort and hope. It is for such a King as Umborto, the gallant son of the soldier king, neither politician nor statesman, perhaps, but brave and simple as all his race, to stand under the still smoking and trembling ruins of an earthquake, or to visit the reeking wards and ascend the ladders of pestilential garrets, just as his sister, .Queen Pi&of Portugal, then a youthful bride, smoothed the pillows of the fever patient,e in Lisbon, and as the ex-Empress of the French in 1867 knelt by the pallet of a cholera-striken man in the hospital at Amiens and pressed his dying hand. " Thank you, mysister," hemurmured, half unconsciously, mistaking her for one of the nurses. "It. is not a sister,'' whispered the nun in his ear. "It is our Empress come to visit us," "Ho nob correct him," said Eugenie, promptly, " ho cannot give me a nobler name." That same day she moved towards a closed door. The head surgeon in attendance begged her not to cross it, as it led to the »mall-pox ward and to some dangerous eases. "Lot me see them," she said; "they suffer too," and entered. She »had as little care for her beauty as for her life, and the crowd outside recognised the abnegation of the woman as well the bravery of the sovereign, and she was well-neigh carried in triumph to her carriage, and her attendants, when they disrobed her, found that the hem of her garments had been cut and carried off as relics. With the faults and failings of her nature and education — faults that hastened, perhaps, the fall of her short-lived popularity—she had the reckless intrepidity of her Celtic origin and the indomitable will of her Spanish forefathers. The beauty of Madrid, the sovereign of the Tuileries, the widow of Fatborough was never lacking in spirit courage.