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UNI OF
CALIFORNIA

READIANA

A BRAVE WOMAN

THE public itches to hear what people of rank and reputation do and say, however trivial. We defer to this taste: and that gives us a right to gratify our own now and then, by presenting what may be called the reverse picture, the remarkable acts, or sufferings, or qualities, of persons unknown to society, because society is a clique; and to fame, because fame is partial.

In this spirit we shall tell our readers a few facts about a person we are not likely to misjudge, for we do not know her even by sight.

31st of August, 1878, a train left Margate for London by the Chatham and Dover line. At Sittingbourne the pointsman turned the points the wrong way, and the train dashed into a shunted train at full speed. The engine, tender, and leading carriages were crushed together and piled over one another. The nearest passengers were chatting merrily one moment, and dead, dying, or mutilated, the next.

Nearest the engine was a third-class carriage, and in its farthest compartment sat a Mrs. Freeland, who in her youth had led an adventurous life in the colonies, but now in middle age had returned to mother England for peace and quiet. She felt a crash and heard a hissing, and for one moment saw the tender bursting through the compartments towards her; then she was hurled down upon her face, with some awful weight upon her, and wedged immovable in a débris of fractured iron, splintered wood, shattered glass, and mutilated bodies.

In a few minutes people ran to help, but in that excited state which sometimes aggravates these dire calamities. First they were for dragging her out by force; but she was

self-possessed, and said: "Pray, be calm and don't attempt it; I am fast by the legs, and a great weight on my back."

Then they were for breaking into the carriage from above; but she called to them, "Please don't do that— the roof is broken, and you don't know what you may bring down upon us and you don't kn

Thus advised by the person most likely to lose her head one would think, they effected an entrance at the sides. They removed from her back an iron wheel and a dead body, and they sawed round her jammed and lacerated limbs, and at last with difficulty carried out a lady, with her boots torn and filled with blood, her clothes in ribbons, her face pouring blood, her back apparently broken, and her right leg furrowed all down to the very foot with a gaping wound, that laid bare the sinews; besides numberless contusions and smaller injuries. They laid her on a mat upon the platform, and there she remained, refusing many offers of brandy, and waiting for a surgeon.

None came for a long time; and benevolent Nature, socalled, sent a heavy rain. At last, in three quarters of an hour, surgeons arrived, and one of them removed her on her mat into a shed, that let in only part of the rain. He found her spine injured, took a double handful of splinters, wood, and glass, out of her head and face, and then examined her leg. He looked aghast at the awful furrow. The sufferer said, quietly, "I should like a stitch or two put into that." The surgeon looked at her in amazement, "Can you bear it?" She said: "I think so."

He said she had better fortify herself with a little brandy. She objected to that as useless. But he insisted, and the awful furrow was stitched up with silk. This done he told her she had better be moved to the Infirmary at Chatham. Army surgeons?" said she. "No, thank you. I shall go to a London hospital."

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Being immovable in this resolution, she had to wait three hours for a train.

At last she was sent up to London, lying upon a mat on the floor of a carriage, hashed, as we have described, and soaked with rain. From the London station she was conveyed on a stretcher to St. George's Hospital. There they discovered many grave injuries, admired her for her courage and wisdom in having had her wounded leg sewn up at once, but told her with regret that to be effectual it must be secured with silver points, and that without delay.

"Very well," said she patiently; "but give me chloroform, for I am worn out."

The surgeon said: If you could endure it without chloroform it would be better. He saw she had the courage of

ten men.

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"Well," said she, "let me have somebody's hand to hold, and I will try to bear it.”

A sympathising young surgeon gave this brave woman his hand and she bore to have the silk threads removed, and thirty little silver skewers passed and repassed through her quivering flesh, sixty wounds to patch up one. It afterwards transpired that the good surgeon was only reserving chloroform for the amputation he thought must follow, having little hope of saving such a leg.

Whatever charity and science-united in our hospitals, though disunited in those dark hells where God's innocent creatures are cut up alive out of curiosity-could do, was done for her at St. George's Hospital; the wounded leg was saved, and in three weeks the patient was carried home. But the deeper injuries seemed to get worse. She lay six months on her back, and after that was lame and broken and aching from head to foot for nearly a year. As soon as she could crawl about she busied herself in relieving the sick and the poor, according to her means.

Fifteen months after the railway accident, a new and mysterious injury began to show itself; severe internal pains, accompanied with wasting, which was quite a new feature in the case. This brought her to death's door after all.

But, when faint hopes were entertained of her recovery, the malady declared itself, an abscess in the intestines. It broke, and left the sufferer prostrate, but out of danger.

Unfortunately, in about a month another formed, and laid her low again, until it gave way like its predecessor. And that has now been her life for months; constantly growing these agonising things, of which a single one is generally fatal.

In one of her short intervals of peace a friend of hers, Major Mercier, represented to her the merits and the difficulties of a certain hospital for diseases of the skin. Instantly this brave woman sets to work and lives for other afflicted persons. She fights the good fight, talks, writes, persuades, insists, obtains the public support of five duchesses, five marchionesses, thirty-two countesses, and a hundred ladies of rank, and also of many celebrated characters; obtains sub

scriptions, organises a grand bazaar, &c., for this worthy object.

Now, as a general rule, permanent invalids fall into egotism; but here is a lady, not only an invalid, but a sufferer, and indeed knocked down by suffering half her time; yet with undaunted heart, and charitable, unselfish soul, she struggles and works for others, whose maladies are after all much lighter than her own.

Ought so much misfortune and merit to receive no public notice? Ought so rare an union of male fortitude and womanly pity to suffer and relieve without a word of praise? Why to us, who judge by things, not names, this seems some heroic figure strayed out of Antiquity into an age of little men and women, who howl at the scratch of a pen.

Such a character deserves to be sung by some Christian poet; but as poetasters are many and poets are few, Mrs. Rosa Freeland, brave, suffering, and charitable, is chronicled in the prose of "Fact."

A BAD FALL

TO THE EDITOR OF "FACT"

SIR,—I sometimes get provoked with the British workman -and say so. He comes into my house to do a day's work, and goes out again to fetch the tool he knew he should want, and does not come back till after breakfast. Then I think I have got him. But no; he sharpens his tools and goes out for a whet. Even when he is at work he is always going into the kitchen for hot water, or a hot coal, or the loan of a pair of tongs, or some other blind. My maids, who, before he came, were all industry and mock modesty, throw both these virtues out of window, and are after him on the roof, when he is not after them in the kitchen. They lose their heads entirely, and are not worth their salt, far less their wages, till he is gone, and that is always a terribly long time, considering how little he has to do. For these reasons, and because whenever he has been out on my roof, the rain comes in next heavy shower, I have permitted myself to call him in print "the curse of families."

Then he strikes, and combines, and speechifies, and calls the capital, that feeds him, his enemy; and sometimes fights with the capital of a thousand against the capital of a single master, and overpowers it, yet calls that a fight of labour against capital. Then he demands short time, which generally means more time to drink in, and higher wages, which often means more money to drink with. Thereupon I lose my temper, rush into print, and call the British workman the British talk-man, and the British drink-man.

But it must be owned all this is rather narrow and shallow. "Where there's a multitude there's a mixture," and a private gentleman in my position does not really know the mass of the workmen, and their invaluable qualities.

One thing is notorious—that in their bargains with capital they are very lenient in one respect, they charge very little

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