“Chi poco sa, presto lo dice!”

Wisdom of Nations.

Of course we are not behindhand in our village in the Red Cross movement.

Nearly every woman, whatever her views, fancies herself nowadays in the rÔle of ministering angel. It may be doubted whether an existence devoted to the Tango and its concomitants has been a useful preparation for a task which demands the extreme of self-devotion; and we have heard odd little tales of how a whole body of charming and distinguished amateurs rushed into the cellars at the whiz of a shell, abandoning their helpless patients; and how the fair chief of a volunteer ambulance staff fainted at the sight of the first wounded man.

Yet there may be many, even among what is odiously called “the smart set,” who only find their true vocation at such a moment as this, when unsuspected qualities, heroic capacities spring into life at the test. It is not enough to say that times of great calamity sift the good from the bad, the strong from the futile: they give the wasters in every class of life their chance of self-redemption—in numberless instances not in vain. While freely admitting, however, that there may be a good proportion of society women who are drawn to work among the wounded by a genuine desire to help, and have therefore taken care to qualify themselves for the task, who can deny that with others nursing is merely a new form of excitement, the last fashionable craze? It was the same in the South African War. Indeed, the episode of the wounded soldier who put up a little placard with the inscription, “Much too ill to be nursed to-day,” has, we see, been revived in connection with the present conflict. It may be taken as the classic expression of Tommy’s feelings towards this particular form of attention. We do not suppose, however, that the case of the tender-hearted but unenlightened lady who went about Johannesburg feeding the enteric patients with buns will be allowed to repeat itself at Boulogne or Calais. We well remember reading her letter to the papers, in which she innocently vaunted her fatal ministrations, inveighing against the monstrous fashion in which “our poor sick soldiers” were being starved. We believe eleven victims of her charity died.

A late distinguished general had a genial little anecdote anent the energies of a batch of fair nurses who landed in Egypt during the last campaign. Happening to go round the hospital one morning shortly after their arrival, he saw one of these enchanting beings, clad in the most coquettish of nursing garbs, bending over a patient.

“Wouldn’t it refresh you if I were to sponge your face and hands, my man?” she inquired, in dulcet tones.

The patient, who was pretty bad, rolled a resigned but exhausted glance at her.

“If you like, mum. It’s the tenth time it’s been done this morning!”

Perhaps, like the war itself, everything is on too tremendous a scale now to permit of such light-hearted playing with the dread sequels of combat. We can no more afford to make a game of nursing than a game of fighting in this world struggle. It is possible that only such of our mondaines as have the necessary knowledge and devotion are permitted to have charge of those precious lives, and that the others confine themselves to post-cards and coffee-stalls, and dashing little raids into the firing-lines with chocolates and socks. We trust it may be so. We confess that what we ourselves beheld of the local amateur Red Cross fills us with some misgiving.

Of course, as has been said, being a very enlightened community, we were not going to be left behind. A special series of lectures was announced almost within a week of the declaration of war. The daughter of the household determined to join.

On her arrival, a little late, at the village hall, she was met by the secretary of the undertaking; a charming and capable young lady, looking, however, at this particular moment distraught to the verge of collapse.

“Oh, do you know anything about home nursing? Do you think you could teach a little class how to take temperatures? You could easily pick up what you want to learn afterwards, couldn’t you? There are such a lot of them, and they’re all so, so——” She substituted “difficult to teach” for the word trembling on her lips. “Nurse Blacker doesn’t know which way to turn.”

“Oh, I can certainly teach them to take temperatures,” said the Signorina. Nurses, like poets, are born, not made; and she is of those who have the instinct how to help. Besides this she has had experience.

She was disappointed, however. She had come to learn, not to teach. It seemed to her, moreover, almost inconceivable that any female who had arrived at years of discretion and was of normal intellect should not be able to take a temperature; but she swallowed her feelings, after the example of the secretary, and went briskly in to begin her task.

She was provided with a jug of warm water, several thermometers, and a row of various women, ranging from the spinster of past sixty to the red-cheeked sixteen-year old daughter of the local vet—who ought to have known how to take a temperature, if it was only a dog’s! There were also two fluttering beribboned summer visitors from the neighbouring hotel; these were doing the simple life, with long motor veils and short skirts and a general condescending enthusiasm towards our wild moorland scenery, which they were fond of qualifying as “too sweet!”

“Perhaps,” said the secretary to the Signorina as she hurried away, “you could teach them to take a pulse also. They can practise on each other. It would be such a help.”

The Signorina felt a little shy. It did seem somewhat presuming for anything so young as she was to be instructing people who were all, with the exception of the vet’s daughter, considerably older, and, therefore, obviously considerably richer in experience than herself. It added to her embarrassment that the summer visitors should fix two pairs of rapt eyes upon her with the expression of devotees listening to their favourite preacher.

However, she summoned her wits and her courage, and gave a brief exposition of the mysteries of thermometer and pulse, patiently repeating herself, while the students took copious notes. Certainly there was something touching in this humble ardour for useful knowledge. Then the thrilling moment of practice began.

The spinster first monopolized the instructress’s attention. Her white hairs and her years entitled her to precedence.

“Of course,” she remarked, with the air of one whose scientific education has not been altogether neglected, as she balanced her thermometer over the jug, “the water won’t really make it go up, will it, no matter how hot it is?”

The Signorina did not think she could have understood.

“I mean,” said the maiden lady, waving the little tube, “it’s not heat that will ever make the thermometer go up. It’s fever, isn’t it?”

“But fever is heat,” mildly asserted the “home-nurse.”

“Oh no, I don’t mean that” said the spinster loftily. “Of course, I know you’re hot with fever; but it’s something in you, isn’t it, that affects the thermometer? It wouldn’t go up, even if I put it on the stove, would it?”

“Put it into the jug and try,” said the Signorina, who did not believe that language would be much use here.

“Oh, I think,” interpolated a summer guest who was much impressed by the spinster’s grasp of the situation, “I’d rather try my thermometer on my cousin, please! I think one would learn better. It would be more like hospital practice, wouldn’t it?”

The spinster turned from the jug with alacrity.

“I’m sure you are right,” she cried. Then wheeling on her neighbour: “Oh, would you mind?” she pleaded.

The neighbour, a tailor-made lady with a walking-stick, who looked on with a twisted smile—we suspect she was a suffragette, pandering to the weakness of a world distracted from the real business of life—submitted to be made useful. Her smile became accentuated.

“Shouldn’t mind if it was a cigarette,” she remarked in a deep bass, and thereafter was silent, while the spinster laboriously prepared to take two minutes on her watch.

“Please, dear child,” cried one of the motor-veiled ladies in her impassioned tone of interest, “will you explain to me again, what is normal? I’d better take it out, dear! There’s no use doing it wrong, is there? You said something about a little red line—or is that for fever? How silly I am—red would be for fever, wouldn’t it? No? Red is normal, darling. Oh, I do hope you’re normal! What did you say, ninety-eight, point four? I never could do arithmetic and I’m so stupid. My husband always says—doesn’t he, Angela?—‘You won’t do much adding up, Birdie’—he calls me ‘Birdie,’—‘but I can trust you to subtract all right,’ dear, naughty fellow! He loves me to spend, you know, doesn’t he, Angela? Oh dear, it hasn’t moved at all! Is that very bad? Angela, darling!”

“But you didn’t leave it in two minutes,” said the persevering teacher. “Supposing you were to put it in your mouth now, and your cousin were to take you?”

“Will you, Angela?” The summer visitor’s eyes became pathetic. “I’m sure I’ve been feeling quite dreadful with all this anxiety.”

“Your temperature,” said the spinster triumphantly to the suffragette, “is a hundred and twenty-eight.”

The Signorina started.

“But that’s quite impossible! Look here, let me show you. It won’t mark over a hundred and ten.”

For the first time the spinster was flustered.

“Oh, perhaps I read it wrong! Let me look again.”

After much fumbling and peering she became apologetic.

“I see I did make a mistake. It’s twenty-six.”

“Perhaps,” said the little lecturer hopelessly, “if I just went over the readings of the thermometer with you all once more——”

But she was interrupted.

“Would you mind”—the harassed secretary seized her by the elbow—“would you mind coming to superintend the bed-making? I’ve got to take the bandage class, and Nurse Blacker can’t really manage more than twenty with the compresses.”

The whole room was full of the clapper of excited female tongues. The Signorina was not sorry to leave the jug of warm water and the extraordinary fluctuating temperatures. She was followed by the summer visitors, motor veils and ribbons flying.

As she left, a cheerful, red-faced lady was heard to announce casually, as she dropped the fat wrist of the veterinary’s daughter, that there was no use her trying to take that pulse, as the girl hadn’t got any.

The clamorous group surrounded the camp-bed, upon which was stretched a sardonic boy-scout, fully clothed, down to his clumping boots. He was aged about twelve, and assisted in the education of the “lidies” by commenting from time to time on their efforts in hoarse tones of cynicism. After one impulsive neophyte had seemed to be practising tossing him in a blanket, he remarked into space: “Nurses are not suppowsed to move the pytient.”

And to another who jerked his heels up: “Down’t you forget, miss, I’m a bad caise!”

The Signorina had never been taught how to make beds in the true hospital fashion before, and was painstakingly absorbed in the intricacies of rolling sheets without churning the “bad caise,” when she was seized upon by one of the flutterers from the hotel.

“We’re going now; it’s been so interesting, we have enjoyed it. I shan’t forget all you told me about temperatures. I feel quite able to look after our dear fellows already. Oh! I must tell you. You’ve got such a sympathetic face. I’m sure you will understand. I had a most wonderful revelation the other day, in church—in London, you know. I had such an extraordinary feeling—just as if something came over me—and I thought the church was full of dead soldiers; and a voice seemed to say to me: ‘Pray.’ I felt quite uplifted. And then in a minute it was all gone. Wasn’t it wonderful? That kind of thing makes one feel so strong, doesn’t it? Oh, I knew you would understand. The last news is very disquieting, isn’t it? What a darling little fellow!”

The “bad caise” scowled at her horribly; but the sweetness of her smile was quite unimpaired, as she fluttered out of the hall.

“It is very important,” said Nurse Blacker to the compress class, “that the nurse should wash her hands before touching the patient’s wounds.”

“Now, tell me, Sister,” interposed a meek voice, “is that precaution for the nurse’s sake or for the patient’s? I mean, I suppose it’s in case the nurse should incur any infection from the wound?”

This point of view—that of the White Queen in “Alice Through the Looking-Glass”—had not apparently struck Nurse Blacker before.

It all seems too ridiculous to be true, but yet the facts are here set down as they actually occurred.

We think there are a good many women about the world of the type of the spinster and her sisters, and we are also convinced that it would be quite impossible to succeed in impressing upon such minds even the most rudimentary notions of nursing; yet it is likely enough they may all have been granted certificates eventually. Professionals are dreadfully bored in dealing with amateurs, and are often glad to take the shortest road to deliverance.

We were once witness, in pre-war days, of the examination of a Red Cross class in the north of England. There was a weary doctor on the platform with a bag of bones; and a retired hospital nurse, very anxious to be on good terms with the delightful family who were the chief organizers of the movement, had charge of the “show.”

The doctor gave a brief address upon dislocation. It ran somewhat in this fashion.

“Dislocation is the misplacement of a joint. It is indicated by the symptoms of swelling, redness, pain, and inability to move the limb. There is no crepitation as in a fracture. As to treatment: my advice to you, ladies, when you meet a case of this kind, is—ahem—to leave it severely alone and to send for a medical man.”

The class took copious notes. The doctor dropped the two bones with which he had been demonstrating into the bag again, leant back in his chair and closed his eyes. His part of the transaction was concluded. It had been most illuminating, the ladies agreed, and the Signorina’s chauffeur, who has a yearning towards general self-improvement, remarked to her on the way home:

“Ow”—like the boy scout, he has a theatrically cockney accent—“I am glad to know what to do for discollation. I’d never studied that, loike, before.”

While the doctor leant back and rested, the hospital nurse examined each student privately on the subject of the previous instructions. The Signorina happened to be quite close to a little old lady with bonnet and strings, and a small, eager, withered, agitated face under bands of frizzled grey hair—the kind of little old lady who is always ready to respond to the call of duty, and who is in the van of knitters for “our dear, brave soldiers” or “our gallant tars.”

“What,” said the hospital nurse tenderly, “would you do for a bed-sore?”

The little old lady began to twitter and flutter:

“I would first wash the place with warm water, and—oh, dear me, dear me, I did know, I knew quite well a minute ago—with, with something to disinfect.”

“It is something to disinfect, quite right,” approved the nurse.

“A salt, I think—I’m sure it was. I could get it at the chemist——”

“Certainly,” said the nurse, as if she were speaking to a child of two years old, “the chemist would be sure to keep it. It’s quite a simple thing. But you would have to know what to ask for, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh, dear me, yes. P—p— or did it begin with an I?”

“Perchloride of mercury,” said the nurse, smothering a yawn.

“Oh yes,” cried the little old lady, delighted, “that’s it.”

“Well, now you know it, don’t you,” said the nurse brightly, wrote “Passed” in her notebook, and turned to the next.

“How much liquid nourishment would you give a typhoid patient at a time?”

This to a village girl, who looked blank, not to say terrified, and wrung her hands in her lap.

“I mean,” helped the questioner, “if the patient were put on milk—a milk diet, very usual in typhoid cases—how much milk would you give at a time?”

The girl’s face lit up.

“Two quarts, miss,” she said with alacrity.

“Not at a time, I think,” corrected the examiner, quite unruffled. “Two quarts, perhaps, in the twenty-four hours, if you could get the patient to take it—that would be splendid. Typhoid is a very weakening malady. It’s a good thing to keep the strength up—if you can, you know.”

The Signorina heard this optimist make her report a little later to the charming daughter of the charming family, who had herself studied to good purpose, but was too modest to undertake the instructions.

“They’ve all answered beautifully. Look at my notebook——”

It was “Passed,” “Passed,” to every name.

“That is good,” said the gratified organizer. “We have done well to-day.”

No doubt one occasionally comes across odd specimens even among professionals. Certainly, during a long illness with which the Signora was afflicted a couple of years ago, three of the five nurses who succeeded each other in attendance upon her cannot be said to have lightened the burthen.

The first, sent for at eleven o’clock at night, distinguished herself by instantly upsetting a basin of hot water into the patient’s bed. As she repeated the process next night, and greeted the accident with shrieks of laughter, it could scarcely be regarded as the exceptional breach which proves the rule of excellence.

The Signora, who was not supposed to be moved at all, has, fortunately, the sense of humour which helps one along the troublesome way of life, in sickness as in health. She laughed too. The nurse, who was an Irishwoman, immediately thought herself rather a wag. She was a little, vivacious creature, ugly, but bright-eyed. She was extremely talkative, and perhaps the most callous person the Signora has ever come across. It is our experience that all nurses are talkative. If the patient wants to make life endurable at all, the talk must be guided into the least disagreeable channels.

The Signora’s dread is the tale of operations—“of practice in the theatre,” which one of the nurses of her youth told her she considered “an agreeable little change.”—This particular Dorcas’s favourite topic was deathbeds. The patient was quite aware that the supreme experience was a not at all impossible event for herself in the near future, so she had a certain personal interest in the matter. Anyhow, she permitted the discourse.

She heard at full length the narration of Nurse MacDermott’s first deathbed in private nursing. It was a horrible anecdote, which might have formed a chapter in a realistic novel. “A gentleman at Wimbledon it was,” evidently of the well-to-do merchant class, and he seemed, poor man! to have been the unhappy father of a family as cold-blooded and heartless as the wife in Tolstoi’s painful story of death. But here there was no one to care, not even a poor servant lad—not even the nurse whose vocation it was to help him through the final agony. She arrived at ten o’clock, and at eleven the doctor warned the family that the patient would not pass the night. Thereupon everyone—the wife, two daughters, and a son—retired to bed, and left the dying man in charge of the newly arrived attendant, who sat down to watch, reading a novel. About two o’clock the moribund began to make painful efforts to speak.

“Charlie, Charlie,” he kept saying.

“Ah, the poor fellow!” said the little nurse, as she recounted the story, “he had a son who was a scapegrace, it seems, off away somewhere, and he wanted to send him a message. I ran and called the wife out of her bed—what do you think? She’d put her hair in crimpers! Upon my word, she had; they were bristling all round the head of her. Well, I didn’t want to have him die on me while I was out of the room, so I rushed back. And he made signs to me. The power of speech was gone from him. He wanted to write. I had a bit of pencil, but there wasn’t a scrap of paper that I could see, so there was nothing I could give him but the fly-leaf of the book I was reading; and ah! the poor fellow, it was only scrawls he could make after all. And sure, he was dead before his wife came in. And she just gave one look at him, and, ‘I’m going back to bed,’ says she, and back to bed she went. But it was the hair-curlers that did for me. I never can forget them.”

She was sitting at the end of the Signora’s bed, and doubled herself up with laughter as she spoke. We have no doubt but that she went back to her novel, scrawled with the dying father’s last futile effort.

We never knew anyone quite so frankly unmoved by the awful scenes it was her trade to witness. She found vast amusement in the wanderings of delirious patients. Whenever she wanted to cheer the other nurses up, she informed us, in the Home where they dwelt together, she could always make them laugh with little anecdotes from the typhoid ward; and the “wanderings” from the different beds.

She tried to cheer the Signora up on these lines; and the Signora, on wakeful nights, has to force her mind away from the “humorous” memories. She infinitely preferred the story of Nurse McDermott’s love affairs. Like many ugly people, the young woman believed herself irresistible, and paid a great deal of attention to the conservation of her charms. Once, having settled her patient for the night, she reappeared unexpectedly en robe de chambre.

“I have just come to tell you how many creams I have put on myself,” she cried to the bewildered lady. “I know it will amuse you! There’s the pomade for my hair, and Valaze for my face, and the lanoline for my neck. I do hate the mark of the collar—for evening dress, you know—it gives one away so! And there’s the salve for my lips, and the cold cream for my hands, and the polish for my nails——”

She went away in a hurry to a bad case at Liphurst, jubilating because we were paying her journey, and she would get it out of the other lady also, and the doctor had offered to send her in his car.

Of quite another type was Nurse Vischet. No one could say that she was unaffected by her patient’s symptoms. They had the power of flinging her into frenzy. Capable enough when things were going fairly well with her charge, the first shadow of a change for the worse produced in her what can only be described as fury. Her face would become convulsed, her eyes would flame, she would knock the furniture about as she moved, and could barely restrain herself from insulting the sufferer.

At first the Signora, who was very ill and weaker than it is possible to describe, could not at all understand these outbursts. “What can have annoyed Nurse?” she would wonder feebly to herself. But presently she understood. It was really a mixed terror of, and repulsion from, the sight of suffering. Why such a woman should have become a nurse, and how she could continue in the service of the sick, feeling as she did, remains a mystery. The key to her extraordinary behaviour was given one day by a little dog, who happened to be seized with a very common or garden fit of choking through the nose; such as affects little dogs with slight colds in their heads. Nurse Vischet started screaming.

“He’s all right,” said the Signora. “He only wants his nose rubbed. Carry him over to me if you won’t do it yourself.”

“Ugh!” shrieked Nurse Vischet. “I think it’s dying. I wouldn’t touch it for the world!”

One of the symptoms of the human patient’s illness were agonizing headaches, during which she could scarcely bear a ray of light in the room. In spite of frequent requests, Nurse Vischet always seized the occasion to turn the ceiling electric light full on the bed, and when at last forbidden to do so, she declined to enter a room in which she could not see her way. The Signora gave her the name of her “ministering devil.” She was a rabid Socialist, and had peculiar theories, one of which we remember was that condemned criminals should be handed over to the laboratories for vivisection.

She had also to an acute degree the hospital nurse’s capacity for upsetting the household. Our butler, a hot-tempered man, happened to drop a stray “damn” in the hearing of the under-housemaid, and Vischet, hanging on the landing over the kitchen regions, as she was fond of doing, overheard the dread word. The whole establishment was turned upside down. Maggie was told that she “owed it to her womanhood” not to allow foul language in her presence. Maggie gave notice, but being, after all, an Irish girl with a sense of humour, was as easily soothed down as she had been worked up. Certainly, however, if we had kept Nurse Vischet, we should have lost, one by one, our excellent staff of servants. Besides playing on their feelings against each other, she had a horrible trick of telling them they were at the last gasp upon the smallest ailment. She did not like her patient to have symptoms; but she encouraged the domestics to fly to her with theirs.

Irish Maggie had an indigestion. Vischet declared her condition to be of extreme gravity. She rushed to the Signora with her tale. Maggie was ordered to bed. Vischet produced an immense tin of antiphlogistine with which to arrest “the mischief.”

The daughter of the house went up to visit the sick girl, and came down laughing to console her mother.

“You needn’t worry about Maggie,” she said, and gave a pleasant little description of the scene and the invalid’s remarks.

“Ah, sure I’m all right, miss. It’s all along of a bit of green apple. Sure, Mrs. MacComfort has just given me a drop of ginger, and it’s done me a lot of good already. Do you see what Nurse is after bringing me? God bless us all, wouldn’t I rather die itself than be spreading that putty on me! I’ll be up for tea, miss.”

“She looks as rosy as possible,” went on the comforter, “and ever so nice with her hair in a great thick plait tied with ribbons, grass green, for Ireland.”

Through one recollection Vischet will always remain endeared to the mind of her victim; and that was for her singular pronunciation. There was a story to which the Signora was fond of leading up relating to por-poises, (pronounced to rhyme with noises), and another connected with a tor-toise, which happened to be the pet of a recent “case.” There was also a little tale of a dog: “I was out walking on the embankment,” said Vischet, “and I saw a man coming along leading two dogs—one was a great bulldog, and the other was one of those queer creatures you call a dashun” (the Signora prides herself on her intelligence for instantly discovering that the narrator meant a dachshund). “And there was running about loose the queerest animal ever I saw,” went on the nurse; “it had the head of a bulldog and the legs of a dashun.”

The third nurse was very different. The daughter of an officer, who was seeking the most genteel way to make her living, she frankly handed over the chief of the attendance to the Signora’s own devoted maid; which, on the Signora becoming aware of her incapacity, she was on the whole glad that she should do. Nurse Fraser was a tall, handsome girl, who was fond of sitting on the sofa at the foot of the patient’s bed, her hands clasped round her knees, staring into space. She was by no means unamiable, but she was bored; and the Signora, who rather liked her, was not averse to screening her deficiencies. When the doctor inquired after the temperature that had never been taken, she herself would declare it had been normal; and she was amused when Nurse Fraser would next vouch for a “splendid breakfast.” She not having appeared in her patient’s room till noon.

She made no attempt to conceal her complete inefficiency in the treatment of the case.

“Oh, do tell me what I’m to do,” she had cried on arrival to the district nurse who had come in as a stopgap. “I’m sure if I ever knew anything about the illness I’ve quite forgotten.”

One day—she, too, was garrulous—she informed her patient that her mother had shares in Kentish Mines. “If ever they work out, we may get a lot of money, and then,” she cried, quite unconscious of offence, “no more beastly sick people for me!”

She left us in tears. She had enjoyed herself very much.

It would seem as if our experience had been unfortunate, and yet it is not so; for surely to have known two perfect nurses one after another is sufficient to re-establish the balance. Chief of these, first and dearest, was Nurse Dove. She was the district nurse, called in, as we have said, in a moment of emergency. How Miss Nightingale would have loved her! Blessed little creature, it was enough to restore anybody’s heart to see her come into the sick-room, quiet, capable, tender, her eyes shining with compassion for the sufferer and eagerness to relieve. She was as gentle as she was skilful: to anyone who did not know her it would be impossible to convey the extent of the virtue contained in this phrase. The Signora would have placed herself, or, what means a great deal more, her nearest and dearest, with the completest confidence in her hands alone, in any dangerous illness.

Among the poor she was an apostle. It seemed to have been her fate that, during her brief stay in our village, several young mothers found themselves in mortal extremity. She never lost a life. We think now with longing of what she would have been among the wounded. Alas! we were not destined to keep such perfection with us. It was Cupid, not death, that robbed us of this treasure—if Cupid, indeed, it can be called, the dingy, doubtful imp that took her away from her wonderful work among us. Alas! charming, devoted, exquisite being as she was, she had a very human side. We fear there was a touch of “pike,” as the old gardener had it, in the business, but in spite of all our efforts a “coloured gentleman,” an invalid to boot, a shifty elderly fellow with an Oriental glibness of tongue, carried her off away with him back to India. She has since written to us describing her palatial abode on the borders of a lake with a horde of servants and a private steam-launch, but we strongly suspect that if the pen was the pen of Nurse Dove, the words were the words of the coloured gentleman.

The individual was a Baboo, a clerk in the Madras Post Office, and had already been invalided out of the service before he left England. We cannot believe that the pension of an underling in the Indian Civil Service runs to these Rajah-like splendours. Moreover, there was a tragic little postcard, sent to a humble friend, which did not at all correspond with the highflown letter above-mentioned: “The world is a very sad place; we must all be prepared for disappointments.”

There is one thing quite certain—wherever she goes she will be doing good.

Curiously enough, the second perfect nurse resembled her in dark pallor of skin, splendour of raven tresses, and thoughtful brilliance of brown eyes; but she was younger and more timid. She will want a few more years of experience and self-reliance before she can develop into a Nurse Dove.

But nevertheless, resembling her in countenance, she had the same deep womanly heart for her patients. Suffering in their sufferings, she would spare no pains to relieve them. And she had the touch of imaginative genius and the courage to act on her own responsibility which made her presence in a house of sickness a comfort and a strength. In fact, the life was to her a vocation. She nursed to help others, not herself. She had not grown callous through the sight of agonies, only more urgent to be of use.

God send many such to our men in their need to-day!