'I can't tell what ails my child, ma'am,' said a labourer's wife to the writer of this, one bitter day last winter, 'he's carrying on so strange: crowing like a cock, and turning his-self almost black in the face every nows and again.' The infant in question was comfortably seated on a nice cold door-step, and breathing as if he had swallowed a baby's rattle by mistake. 'Your child has the croup,' I said, picking up the unfortunate little creature and carrying it to the fireside; 'and if you don't do something for him at once, he'll very likely die.' However something _was_ done for him, and he didn't die; but he had a kick for his life all the same, and very little more door-step would have finished him. Yet this poor woman was not an unloving mother; she was only ignorant, and in her ignorance, assisting her child into the grave she would have shed such bitter tears over. From croup to diphtheria is a natural progression, and we would wish to say a few, a very few words on this terrible disease; not as to its treatment by the amateur nurse, for it is of the greatest importance that such cases should have close medical care. It is then on the subject of the operation called _tracheotomy_--that is, the making an outward incision in the windpipe below the seat of the disease, and inserting a tube for the purpose of respiration, that we would speak--not to discuss it in its medical aspect, but simply to say a word or two to nervous mothers who would shrink from the idea of the surgeon's knife touching a sick child under any circumstances whatever. Surely there can be no more pitiful sight to look upon than a child dying of diphtheria--the eyes wild with fear, looking appealingly for help from one troubled face to another; the little hand thrust into the mouth in helpless, useless effort to dislodge the terrible leather-like substance that is clogging up the throat, and making each breath a sound so painful that for days and weeks to come it will not cease to sound in our ears. What more agonising sight can the sick-room give us to gaze upon? And yet doctors have told us of cases in which a mother has had such an overpowering dread of the surgeon's knife, that even when things come to such a state as this, she has positively refused to allow of any attempt at alleviation of her child's agony by a simple operation!