Amiable sympathy is not the sole qualification which the lady nurse needs. Self-consciousness is as much a disqualification as a shuddering dislike of sick room scenes. It is also the attribute that the patient is the most quick to observe. Not a few of the sick whom the ministering angel of the new school desires to relieve may still sigh for the presence by their bedside of the displaced Mrs Gamp instead of the young lady in the coquettish muslin cap and dainty grey frock who casts complacent glances at herself as she passes the mirror, and with an air not quite suited for a sick room offers her patient his medicine or his barley water as if she were suggesting black coffee, green Chartreuse, and a cigarette after a whitebait dinner. These defects will no doubt be mended when the lady nurse is more habituated to her calling. Decayed billiard markers, and scripture readers who have gone wrong, will not eventually figure so largely among the self-sacrificing males who also find their career in tending the invalid. The scandals of which the nurse (old style) was sometimes the heroine still live in the pages of Dickens. They arose from the rumoured hastening of the sick man's death by the scriptural practice of laying a wet cloth over his mouth. Any scandals with which the nurse (new style) might be connected would perhaps come from the desirable marriage that she arranges for herself in the sick room or from the legacies made to her by grateful patients, but disputed by thankless relations. These things, therefore, should be no doubt regarded not as slurs upon her disinterestedness, but as tributes to her efficiency. Inside the hospital the same transformation has been effected as in the aspect of the ministering angels themselves. The grave young gentlemen in training for the medical profession have nothing about them left of the lamp breaking, policemen baiting, medical student of Albert Smith. If sometimes one reads of the too engrossing attractions for these youths of the sylphs who flit to and fro in the wards, the answer is obvious--'Evil be to him who evil thinks.'