an ordinary cat would, asked me to look in on the invalid and see what I thought of him. I went into the dressing-room, and even there the evil was apparent. A hot gust of air met me, and, to my horror, I saw no less than three gas jets, in a small room, flaring away, because the lady wanted plenty of light, and thought it would cheer the restless, fevered creature whose uneasy head was tossing on the pillow, and whose wild eyes looked in vain for relief; so out went all that gas, the windows were opened at the top, two wax candles, provided with shades, were lighted, and in less than an hour the room became cool, and the poor man was asleep for the first time for--I had almost written days; and it was certainly days since he had had any deep or restful sleep at all. I do not think, even, when we are grown up, we at all realise the necessity or even the possibility of complete rest; but a baby does, poor little thing, and is very often never allowed to have it. There is no sense of peace in most houses, and I want dreadfully to impress upon all my readers that they must ‘seek peace and ensue it’ for their children, if they utterly refuse to do it for themselves, and, therefore, the nursery should be quiet, and should even be a haven of rest to the mother herself, when she is overdone with her unpaid-for, never-ceasing work; and where she has her especial chair and footstool, and where she comes not only to see the babies, but to have the quiet, confidential talk with nurse, who should be able to have confidence reposed in her; or she is most certainly not fit for her place, which, if it be not a confidential one in the very highest sense of the word, is positively nothing at all. The night nursery should, of course, have a fireplace and a ventilator. The fire should not be a matter of course, unless the room is far from the day nursery, when a fire should be lighted in cold weather as a matter of course. A room for children should never be overheated in any way; but no one should fall into the foolish idea that a fireless bedroom is hardening, and a fire makes people tender, for it does nothing of the sort; it simply makes life bearable to the chilly, and prevents all those dreadful lung troubles that used to be the scourge of so many English families, but that since the almost entire disappearance of those foolish, wicked low frocks and short sleeves in our nurseries, and the appearance of more fires, have well nigh been stamped out; and will be stamped out entirely when the Queen, so sensible in all other ways, puts a stop to the order she has given about low dresses, and recognises that people can be quite as full dressed with their clothes on as they are almost stripped to the waist and exposed, in the most delicate part of the human frame, to the bitter winds from which we English people are never entirely free.