illness to engage women who understand their work? I am convinced it is, and strongly recommend anyone who is advised by the doctor to send for a nurse to do so. He will always be able to tell them where to send; if not, they can find any amount of addresses in that most useful and excellent little book ‘Dickens’s Dictionary of London.’ But the doctor should find the nurse in infectious cases, for, as a rule, he knows someone with whom he has worked already, and of course these nurses have to be sent for in a hurry; one does not make preparations for and look out for fevers as one does when a small baby is expected; about that I have said all I have to say in my other book, and shall not therefore say anything here on that absorbing subject. Everybody should remember that illness, instead of deadening our faculties, undoubtedly and at once heightens every one we possess. We see more acutely most certainly; our smell and taste are exaggerated in the most painful degree, and little annoyances and inferior cooking, which we scarcely notice, or indeed notice not at all, when we are well, try us most dreadfully. If we are to eat at all, all must be absolutely clean and free from grease, and sent up spotlessly; there must not be a suspicion of carelessness, or inevitably we shall turn against the food and send it down untouched. Likewise, creaking shoes, rustling paper, banging doors, crooked pictures, dusty tables and chairs must not exist where there are invalids; and, above all, I am convinced that until a person is actually and positively dead no one should talk about them over their bodies, thinking they are insensible. I am certain that insensible people, so called, are often far more sensitive than either doctor or nurse will allow, and I know I myself have often heard things which were never meant for me to hear when people have thought me asleep, but when I have really simply been too tired to open my eyes; and I shall never forget the expression that flitted across the face of a dear old lady who was absolutely dying, who had not swallowed for two days, or spoken for a great many more, when her daughter and maid spoke of the mourning and funeral by her bedside heartlessly. She heard and understood, although she undoubtedly had no power of letting us know that she did so. And I, moreover, have been told by a cousin whose recovery from a frightful attack of blood-poisoning was miraculous, and who most certainly was merely saved from death by her doctor’s unremitting care and the excellent nursing she received from him--he never left her once for over forty-eight hours--that she knew absolutely everything that went on, that she heard every single word and whisper, and that she most certainly would never say a word in the presence of any ‘insensible’ person that could pain or agitate him in the least, for when she appeared most insensible to on-lookers she was really far more sensitive than she had ever been in all her life: her hearing was