fixed, and as it was speedily put to rights, the operator was encouraged by Dr. Stanforth with “Better luck next time my boy. Sister, let us have another patient!” How the sister managed to induce a second woman to undergo a mysterious ordeal, the purport of which she was not permitted to question, and after the experiences of the first victim, which did not appear to the curious ward as having been altogether pleasant, we do not pretend to understand; but hospital sisters who know their business have clever little ways whereby they aid and abet the doctors in their search for wisdom. Sister Agnes had long felt that her conscience was being overstrained at St. Bernard’s. Her work was developing itself as quite other than she had expected when she gave herself up to the life of a nurse. These good women, at any rate, had a lofty ideal, and followed it with no hope of other than its own reward. They were not seeking fame, or money, or any worldly reward; it was no wonder therefore that a noble-minded woman like Sister Agnes should see that unless the great work of her life, for which she had given up all else, were undeviatingly followed, she at any rate had failed in attaining her mission. It was not to help doctors to get knowledge; it was not by trickery and “white lies,” used to induce defenceless sufferers to submit to horrible ordeals, and indescribably painful examinations for no benefit to themselves, but simply to teach their business to young men, that she had devoted herself to work in the wards of a general hospital. And daily the conduct of Dr. Stanforth and his assistants clearly showed that the patient’s benefit was quite a secondary object, and the chief end of his or her residence in the wards of St. Bernard’s was precisely that of an artist’s model visiting a studio. Very good, doubtless, in its way, but not what the main body of hospital subscribers intend; still less what the patients come for, and only partially, surely, what such as she had left the world to aid. In a word, she saw plainly that the whole system of the modern hospital in great cities was a gigantic sham, a cruel fraud on the subscribers, and an atrocious delusion and a snare to the patients themselves. How difficult a task it would be to convince the world of all this! What an Augean stable for a weak woman to cleanse! Then again nothing annoys the public more than to open the doors of its whited sepulchres. Of course, it was no use to condemn the present system without putting something better in its place. The workhouse infirmary was far better in one sense; there, the object was to help the patient to get well as speedily as possible, and take himself off the books; but there attaches a stigma to the infirmary from which the hospital is free, yet the hospital must be reformed on the model, in some respects, of the infirmaries.