When a future Sister unites the power of command with the power of thought and love, when she can raise herself and others above the commonplaces of a common self without disregarding any of our common feelings, when she can plan and effect any reforms wanted step by step, without trying to precipitate them into a single year or month, neither hasting nor delaying: that is indeed a “Sister.” The future Sister or Head must not see only a little corner of things, her own petty likes and dislikes; she must “lift up her eyes to the hills,” as David says. She must know that there is a greater and more real world than her own littlenesses and meannesses. And she must be not only the friend of her Nurses, but also, in her measure, the angel whose mission is to reconcile her Nurses to themselves, to each other, and to God. III Now let us not each of us think how this fits on to her neighbour, but how it fits on to oneself. Shall I tell you what one of you said to me after I last addressed you?--“Do you think we are missionaries?” I answer, that you cannot help being missionaries, if you would. There are missionaries for evil as well as for good. Can you help choosing? Must you not decide whether you will be missionaries for good, or whether for evil, among your patients and among yourselves? And, first, among your patients: Hospital Nurses have charge of their patients in a way that no other woman has charge; in the first place, no other woman is in charge really of grown-up men. Oh, how careful she ought to be, especially the Night Nurse, to show them what a true woman can be! The acts of a nurse are keenly scrutinised by both old and young patients. If she is not perfectly pure and upright, depend upon it, they know. Also, a Hospital Nurse is in charge of people in their sick and feeble, anxious and dying hours, when they are singularly alive to impressions. She leaves her stamp upon them, whether she will or no. And this applies almost more to the Night Nurse than to the Day Nurse. Lastly, if she have children-patients, she is absolutely in charge of these, who come, perhaps for the first and the last time of their lives, under influence. So many pass by a child without notice. A whole life of happiness or wretchedness may turn upon an act of kindness to it--a good example set it. A poor woman once said of a child of hers under just these circumstances: “The Sister set its face heavenwards: and it never looked back.” Do we ever set their faces the other way? The child she spoke of when it was dying actually gave its halfpence, which it had saved for something for itself, for another dying child “who had nobody.” I call _that_ practising the “heroic virtues,” if ever there were such. And that was done under just such an influence as we have been speaking of.