A carriage with four greys was in attendance, into which, in company with the Mayor and Mayoress, the distinguished visitors were handed, and driven to the Town Hall. Arrived at this imposing structure, they were ushered into the Great Hall, where tables had been laid for apparently about a thousand people. On the right hand of the Mayor sat the guest of the day, with the Warden of the Goldfield—a dread and awful potentate, having power of life and death (financially)—beside her; the Lady Mayoress on the left hand of her lord and master (ancient figure of speech now chiefly obsolete). Next to her sat a lately elected Councillor, who was a representative citizen in several departments of industrial and social development, and might be trusted to find her ladyship in light and airy converse. On either side, as well as at the end of the long table, sat leading mine managers, ‘golden hole men,’ and mercantile representatives, with, of course, their wives and daughters. In prominent positions were distinguished visitors and tourists, such as General Sir Walter and Lady Cameron, the Honourable Denzil Southwater, Sir John and Lady Woods, and other notables of rank and fashion. With the exception of the memorable gathering when the Great Aqueduct discharged its first bounteous, providential flow, no such gathering had ever been witnessed at Pilot Mount. Full justice having been done to the repast, and the healths of the King and Queen heartily and loyally, if briefly, responded to, the Mayor called upon all present to charge their glasses, as he was about to propose the health of the guest of the day—he might say, the heroine of the hour—Mrs. Lilburne. If he gave her the title of Nurse Lilburne, by which she had been known so favourably to the population of the city, and the goldfields generally, perhaps he would be better understood. That burst of cheering, straight from the heart, showed how miners and workers of all classes recognised their true friends, of whatever class or occupation. He had taken the liberty of describing that lady as a heroine. There had been heroines in the history of our Motherland, who had stood upon the battlefield, ministering to the wants of the wounded and the dying, unmoved by feelings of personal danger; heroines who had dared the risks of plague, pestilence, and famine, with unshaken courage and faith in an all-seeing Providence; heroines who had donned armour; heroines who had dared hurricanes or shipwreck, calmly pursuing their ministrations until the ‘whelming wave’ ended the tragedy; but none of these exemplars of womanhood, whether ancient or modern, exceeded in lustre the self-devoted attendant upon the feeble, the stricken, the sick, and the dying, who patiently—at all hours, in all seasons—fought the dread epidemic which had ravaged their city in its earlier days. It had slain a large proportion of the pioneers. Young and old, gentle and simple, tenderly or rudely reared, there had been but little difference in the death-roll. Thank God! the plague had been stayed. Their city was now as free from it and other diseases as the leading metropolitan towns. But they owed it not alone to their excellent medical staff, not to improved sanitation, but, under Heaven, to the nursing staff—among whom the earliest, the most capable, the most unwearied, the most successful in wresting patients from the very jaws of death, was their distinguished—he might say, their illustrious guest, to honour whom they were met that day. He gave them the health of Mrs. Alister Lilburne, more widely known, perhaps more loved and honoured, as ‘Nurse Lilburne.’