"If there is one purpose of a personal kind for which it is especially desirable to lay up means, it is for being well nursed in sickness; yet in the present state of society, this is absolutely impossible, even to the wealthy, because of the scarcity of competent nurses. Families worn down with the long and extreme illness of a member require relief from one whose feelings will be less taxed, and who can better endure the labor. "But alas! how often is it impossible, for love or money, to obtain one capable of taking the burden from the exhausted sister or mother or daughter, and how often in consequence they have died prematurely or struggled through weary years with a broken constitution. Appeal to those who have made the trial, and you will find that very seldom have they been able to have those who by nature or by training were competent for their duties. Ignorant, unscrupulous, inattentive--how often they disturb and injure the patient! A physician told me that one of his patients had died because the nurse, contrary to orders, had at a critical period washed her with cold water. I have known one who, by stealth, quieted a fretful child with laudanum, and of others who exhausted the sick by incessant talking. One lady said that when, to escape this distressing garrulity, she closed her eyes, the nurse exclaimed aloud, 'Why, she is going to sleep while I am talking to her.' "A few only of the sensible, quiet, and loving women, whose presence everywhere is a blessing, have qualified themselves and followed nursing as a business. Heaven bless that few! What a sense of relief have I seen pervade a family when such a one has been procured; and what a treasure seemed found! "There is very commonly an extreme susceptibility in the sick to the _moral atmosphere_ about them. They feel the healthful influence of the presence of a true-hearted attendant and repose in it, though they may not be able to define the cause; while dissimulation, falsehood, recklessness, coarseness, jar terribly and injuriously on their heightened sensibilities. 'Are the Sisters of Charity really better nurses than most other women?' I asked an intelligent lady who had seen much of our military hospitals. 'Yes, they are,' was her reply. 'Why should it be so?' 'I think it is because with them it is a work of self-abnegation, and of duty to God, and they are so quiet and self-forgetful in its exercise that they do it better, while many other women show such self-consciousness and are so fussy!"