Second: field flowers are never double: double flowers change their useful stamens for showy petals, and so have no seeds. These double flowers are like the useless appendages now worn on the dress, and very much in your way. Wild flowers have purpose in all their beauty. So ought dress to have; nothing purposeless about it. Third: the colours of the wild flower are perfect in harmony, and not many of them. Fourth: there is not a speck on the freshness with which flowers come out of the dirty earth. Even when our clothes are getting rather old we may imitate the flower: for we may make them look as fresh as a daisy. Whatsoever we do, whether we eat or drink _or dress_, let us do all to the glory of God. But above all remember, “Be not anxious what ye shall put on,” which is the real meaning of “Take no thought.” This is not my own idea: it was in a Bible lesson, never to be forgotten. And I knew a Nurse who dressed so nicely and quietly after she had heard this Bible lesson that you would think of her as a model. And alas! I have known, oh how many! whose dress was their snare. Oh, my dear Nurses, whether gentlewomen or not, don’t let people say of you that you are like “Girls of the Period”: let them say that you are like “field flowers,” and welcome. (_b_) Cleanliness in person and in our rooms, thinking nothing too small to be attended to in this respect. And if these things are important in the “Home,” think how important they are in the Wards, where cleanliness and fresh air--there can be no pure air without cleanliness--not so much give life as _are_ the very life of the Patients; where the smallest carelessness may turn the scale from life to death; where Disinfectants, as one of your own Surgeons has said, are but a “mystic rite.” Cleanliness is the only real Disinfectant. Remember that Typhoid Fever is distinctly a filth disease; that Consumption is distinctly the product of breathing foul air, especially at night; that in surgical cases, Erysipelas and Pyaemia are simply a poisoning of the blood--generally thro’ some want of cleanliness or other. And do not speak of these as little things, which determine the most momentous issues of life and death. I knew a Probationer who when washing a poor man’s ulcerated leg, actually wiped it on his sheet, and excused herself by saying she had always seen it done so in another place. The least carelessness in not washing your hands between one bad case and another, and many another carelessness which it is plain I cannot mention here--it would not be nice, though it is much less nice to do it--the least carelessness, I say, in these things which every Nurse can be careful or careless in, may cost a life: aye, may cost your own, or at least a finger. We have all seen poisoned fingers.