The letters have needed a little editing. Miss Nightingale had great power of succinct and forcible statement on occasion, but here she was not tabulating statistics nor making a businesslike summary for a Minister in a hurry. Certain ideas had to be impressed, in the first place orally, on minds which were not all highly trained; and for this she naturally wrote in a discursive way. She did not correct the proofs. As readers of her _Life_ will know, she was burdened with other work and delicate health, and she found any considerable revision difficult and uncongenial. It has therefore been necessary to make a few emendations, such as occasionally correcting an obvious misprint, adding a missing word, and taking out brackets, stops, and divisions which obscured the sense. A few of the many repetitions and one or two passages only interesting at the time, have also been left out. The object has been to change as little as possible, and I hope nothing has been done that Miss Nightingale would not have done herself if she had corrected the proofs. The first two addresses give perhaps the fullest expression of the main theme to which she returns again and again. Others have been chosen chiefly for the sake of characteristic illustrations of the same theme. ROSALIND NASH. I LONDON, _May, 1872_. For us who Nurse, our Nursing is a thing, which, unless in it we are making _progress_ every year, every month, every week, take my word for it we are going _back_. The more experience we gain, the more progress we can make. The progress you make in your year’s training with us is as nothing to what you must make every year _after_ your year’s training is over. A woman who thinks in herself: “Now I am a ‘full’ Nurse, a ‘skilled’ Nurse, I have learnt all that there is to be learnt”: take my word for it, she does not know _what a Nurse is_, and she never _will_ know; she is _gone_ back already. Conceit and Nursing cannot exist in the same person, any more than new patches on an old garment. Every year of her service a good Nurse will say: “I learn something every day.” I have had more experience in all countries and in different ways of Hospitals than almost any one ever had before (there were no opportunities for learning in _my_ youth such as you have had); but if I could recover strength so much as to walk about, I would begin all over again. I would come for a year’s training to St. Thomas’ Hospital under your admirable Matron (and I venture to add that she would find me the closest in obedience to all our rules), sure that I should learn every day, learn all the more for my past experience. And then I would try to be learning every day to the last hour of my life. “And when his legs were cuttit off, He fought upon his stumps,” says the ballad; so, when I could no longer learn by nursing others, I would learn by being nursed, by seeing Nurses practise upon _me_. It is all experience.