[171] Robert Robinson, on his return to England, was sent to school and an agricultural college by Miss Nightingale, and obtained employment on Lord Berners's estate in Scotland. Miss Nightingale was constantly befriending him, _e.g._ in paying his expenses for a visit to London to see the Exhibition of 1862, and in sending him illustrated newspapers, and even the _Times_. There was another Crimean lad, besides Tommy, one William Jones, with a wooden leg. See below, p. 304, where account is also given of another protégé, Peter.
Miss Nightingale set to work immediately, and with characteristic energy. One of her first duties was a visit of ceremony to Lord Raglan. She was a good horsewoman, and as a girl had been fond of riding. She was now mounted "upon a very pretty mare, which, by its gambols and caracoling, seemed proud to carry its noble charge, and our cavalcade produced an extraordinary effect upon the motley crowd of all nations assembled at Balaclava, who were astonished at seeing a lady so well escorted." Was not the great Soyer himself among the escort? The Commander of the Forces was away, but Miss Nightingale was taken to the Three Mortar Battery, and the soldiers, as she passed, gave her three times three. This visit to the front made a profound and indelible impression upon her.[172] It is first recorded in a letter of May 10, which was forwarded to Windsor Castle.[173] "Fancy," she wrote, "working five nights out of seven in the trenches! Fancy being 36 hours in them at a stretch, as they were all December, lying down, or half lying down, often 48 hours with no food but _raw_ salt pork, sprinkled with sugar, rum, and biscuit; nothing hot, because the exhausted soldier could not collect his own fuel, as he was expected to do, to cook his own ration; and fancy through all this the army preserving their courage and patience as they have done, and being now eager (the old ones more than the young ones) to be led even into the trenches. There was something sublime in the spectacle." "When I see the camp," she wrote to Lady Canning (May 10), "I wonder not that the army suffered so much, but that there is any army left at all; but now all is looking up. Sir John M'Neill has done wonders." With Sir John M'Neill, a doctor who afterwards entered the Political Service in the East, Miss Nightingale formed a great friendship. He, with Colonel Tulloch, had been sent out to the Crimea by Lord Palmerston's Government to report upon the Commissariat system.