The conversation turning, as, round English fires, it often does, on the peculiarities of an old nurse of the family, I was struck again by the tenderness and kindness, shot through with humour, that are always evoked by this particular retrospective mood. I would even say that people are at their best when they are remembering their nurses. To recall one's parents is often to touch chords that vibrate too disturbingly; but these foster parents, chosen usually with such strange carelessness but developing often into true guardian angels, with good influences persisting through life--when, in reminiscent vein, we set them up, one against the other, can call from the speakers qualities that they normally may conspicuously lack. Quite dull people can become interesting and whimsical as their thoughts wander back through the years to the day when old Martha or old Jane, or whoever it was, moulded them and scolded them and broke the laws of grammar. Quite hard people can then melt a little. Quite stern people can smile. And quite funny people can become intensely funny, as I have melancholy reason to know, for, listening to these new anecdotes, I recalled the last occasion on which the fruitful theme of a Nanna's oddities had been developed; when the speaker was that fascinating athlete and gentleman, E. B., a gallant officer with a gift of mimicry as notable as his sense of fun and his depth of feeling, who, chiefly for the amusement of two children, but equally--or even more--to the delight of us older ones, not only gave us certain of his old nurse's favourite sayings, in her own voice, but reconstructed her features as he did so. All good mimicry astonishes and entertains me, and this was especially good, for it triumphed over the disabilities of a captain's uniform. Something very curious and pretty, and, through all our laughter, affecting, in the spectacle of this tall, commanding soldier painting with little loving comic touches the portrait of the old Malapropian lady with her heart of gold. That was a few short months ago, and to-day E. B. lies in a French grave. Malapropisms and old nurses are, of course, inseparable. Indeed, they formed again the basis of our talk the other evening, each of us having a new example to give, all drawn from memories of childhood. Wonderful how these quaint phrases stick--due, I suppose, to the fact that the child does not hear too much to confuse it, and when in this tenacious stage notices the sharp differences between the conversation of the literate, as encountered in the dining-room and drawing-room, and the much more amusing illiteracy below stairs. It will be a bad day for England when education is so prevalent that nursemaids have it too. Much less interesting will the backward look then become.