“But, alas! how often is it impossible, for love or money, to obtain one capable of taking the burden from the exhausted sister or mother or daughter, and how often in consequence they have died prematurely or struggled through weary years with a broken constitution. Appeal to those who have made the trial, and you will find that very seldom have they been able to have those who by nature or by training were competent for their duties. Ignorant, unscrupulous, inattentive—how often they disturb and injure the patient! A physician told me that one of his patients had died because the nurse, contrary to orders, had at a critical period washed her with cold water. One is known who, by stealth, quieted a fretful child with laudanum, and of others who exhausted the sick by incessant talking. One lady said that when, to escape this distressing garrulity, she closed her eyes, the nurse exclaimed, aloud, ‘Why, she is going to sleep while I am talking to her.’ “A few only of the sensible, quiet, and loving women, whose presence everywhere is a blessing, have qualified themselves and followed nursing as a business. Heaven bless that few! What a sense of relief pervades a family when such an one has been procured; and what a treasure seemed found! “There is very commonly an extreme susceptibility in the sick to the _moral atmosphere_ about them. They feel the healthful influence of the presence of a true-hearted attendant and repose in it, though they may not be able to define the cause; while dissimulation, falsehood, recklessness, coarseness, jar terribly and injuriously on their heightened sensibilities. ‘Are the Sisters of Charity really better nurses than most other women?’ asked an intelligent lady who had seen much of our military hospitals. ‘Yes, they are,’ was the reply. ‘Why should it be so?’ 'I think it is because with them it is a work of self-abnegation, and of duty to God; and they are so quiet and self-forgetful in its exercise that they do it better, while many other women show such self-consciousness and are so fussy!” Is there any reason why every Protestant woman should not be trained for this self-denying office as _a duty owed to God_? We can not better close this chapter than by one more quotation from an intelligent and attractive writer: “The good nurse is an artist. Oh the pillowy, soothing softness of her touch, the neatness of her simple, unrustling dress, the music of her assured yet gentle voice and tread, the sense of security and rest inspired by her kind and hopeful face, the promptness and attention to every want, the repose that like an atmosphere encircles her, the evidence of heavenly goodness and love that she diffuses!” Is not such an art as this worth much to attain?