The Superintendent of the training school shows each new aspirant for the nursing profession that the life is not an easy one, that patience is one of the most necessary characteristics for the nurse. She tells her of the trials, the irritations, the unreason, the tiresomeness of sick people, and still women will come to the school, and forgetting the warnings, they will complain when some exasperating incident occurs. If a nurse, from overwork and the consequent weakening of her nervous energy, has lost her patience, she will be a wise woman if she drops out of nursing work for a year or more; this will probably help her, complaining never will. Do you feel that your patient is cross or unreasonable? That is most likely, and is to be expected in nine cases out of every ten. Put yourself in your patient's place for a little while; try to realize what it is to have a pain, constant and sickening; to have it every minute of the twenty-four hours; try to imagine the fatigue of a respiration of forty; the ache and restlessness of a fever of 103 degrees; the agony of longing to change a position when it cannot be done; the despair of a hope for recovery growing daily less, or the realization of absolute weakness that comes with early convalescence; try to imagine yourself bearing some of these ills with nerves and brain weakened by disease, and you will not wonder that your patient is irritable, that he thinks the minutes of your absence are "hours," that the unevenness of the bed is "hard lumps," that the food is "slops," and the medicine "no good." Remember that he is a prisoner, and he has a cruel jailer; his bed is his prison, his disease is his jailer, and he suffers whatever torments his jailer chooses to inflict. Now prisoners are not, as a rule, a happy class of men; so bear with your prisoner and help him. Complaining about his shortcomings will never make them any the less. He is sick. Oh! the pathos of that short sentence, "He is sick;" that says all. You are well, or you ought to be; therefore bear with him.