I mentioned this Nurse merely as an instance of one who literally fulfilled the precept to “do good” to them that “despitefully use you”: to be “patient, cheerful, and kindly.” There is no time to tell you how she was left a widow with two infants and a blind and insane mother, whom she kept till doctors compelled her to put her mother into a lunatic asylum: how one of her sons was a sickly cripple, whom she nursed till he died, working by day and sitting up with him at night for years: how the other boy was insane, and ran away: how, to ease her broken mother’s heart, she returned to sick-nursing, chiefly among the poor, nursed through two choleras, till her health broke down, and, by way of taking care of herself, then took up the “tedious” orphan system, which she never ceased. She felt, she said, as if she were doing something then for her “own dear boy.” As soon as she lived in a poor house of four rooms and an attic, she has had as many as ten carpenters’ men of a night, who had nowhere but the public-house to go to. She gave them a good fire, borrowed a newspaper for them, and made one read aloud. They brought her sixpence a week, and she laid it all out in supper for them, and cooked it. She gave the only good pair of shoes she had to one of these, because “he must go to work decent!” She was a famous sick cook, often carrying home fish-bones to stew them for the sick, who seldom thanked her; and the remains of damsons and currants, to boil over again as a drink for fever patients: who sometimes accused her of keeping back things sent for them. “How much more the Lord has borne from me,” she used to say. And of children she used to say: “We never can train up a child in the way it should go till we take it in our arms, as Jesus did, and feel: ‘Of such is the kingdom of heaven’; and that there is a ‘heavenly principle’ (a ‘little angel,’ I think she said) in each child to be trained up in it.” She said she had learnt this from the master in a factory where she had once nursed. (How little he knew that he had been one means of forming this heroic Nurse.) II And now I have a word for the Ladies, and a word for the Nurse-Probationers. Which shall come first? Do the ladies follow up their intellectual privileges? Or, are they lazy in their hours of study? Do they cultivate their powers of expression in answering Mr. Croft’s examinations? Ought they not to look upon themselves as future leaders--as those who will have to train others? And to bear this in mind during the whole of their year’s training, so as to qualify themselves for being so? It is not just getting through the year anyhow, without being blamed. For the year leaves a stamp on everybody--this for the Nurses as well as the Ladies--and once gone can never be regained. To the Special Probationers may I say one more word?