But give but one-quarter of an hour a _day_ to jot down, even in words which no one can understand but yourself, the progress or change of two or three individual cases, not to forget or confuse them. You can then write them out at your two leisure times. To those who have not much education, I am sure that our kind Home Sister, or the Special Probationer in the same Ward, or nearest in any way, will give help. The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; and “line upon line”--_one_ line every day--in the steady, observing, humble Nurse has often won the race over the smarter “genius” in what constitutes real Nursing. But few of us women seriously think of improving our own mind or character _every day_. And this is fatal to our improving in Nursing. We do not calculate the future by our experience of the past. What right have we to expect that, if we have not improved during the last six months, we shall during the next six? Then, we do not allow for the changes which circumstances make in us--the being put on Staff duty, when we certainly shall not have more time, but less, for improving ourselves, or the growing older or more feeble in health. We believe that we shall always have the same powers or opportunities for learning our business which we now have. Our time of training slips away in this unimproving manner. And when a woman begins to see how many things might have been better in her, she is too old to change, or it is too late, too late. And she confesses to herself, or oftener she does not confess--“How all her life she had been in the wrong.” We are all of us, as we believe, passing into an unknown world, of which this is only a part. We have been here a year, or part of a year. What are we making of our own lives? Are we where we were a year ago? Or are we fitter for that work of after-life which we have undertaken? Do our faults, and weaknesses, and vanities, tend to diminish? Or are we still listless, inefficient, slow, bustling, conceited, unkind, hard judges of others, instead of helping them where we can? There is no greater softener of hard judgments than is the trying to help the person whom we so judge, as I can tell from my own experience; and in this you will tell me whether we have been deficient to each other. There is a true story told of Captain Marryat when a boy; that he jumped overboard to save an older midshipman who had made the boy’s life a misery to him by his filthy cruelties. And the boy Marryat wrote home to his mother “that he loved this midshipman now--and wasn’t it lucky that his life was saved--even better than his own darling mother.” Do we keep before our minds constantly the sense of our duty here, of our duty to others--Nurses, Sisters, Matron--as well as to ourselves, our fellow Probationers, and our Home Sister, and to the whole School of which we are members?