The English nurse, though we can see that she varies in excellence, is supreme all over the world. We are all of us prone to idealise our nurses, for we only remember the comfort of their presences and are not aware of their acts of negligence or omission, such as giving us comforters to suck—as I am told, a deadly sin—or letting us fall out of perambulators while they were engaged in ambrosial dalliance. We remember with affection their features and their voices, the Moody and Sankey hymns that they used to sing us—diversified, in my own case, with "Ehren on the Rhine"—and the stories which they used to tell. They also used to have fascinating relations who were sometimes allowed to penetrate to us or whom we were allowed to visit. Modern children, I fear, miss these joys, for parents are getting so particular, no doubt quite rightly. Nurses are now trained in special institutions, so that they do all the right things and none of the wrong ones. They are ladylike, oh, so ladylike, and parents obey their commands in fear and trembling. You can see them any day in the Gardens walking along with turned up noses and conscientious faces—the very last thing in baby culture. But let not the Norland nurses take umbrage at these foolish remarks, for their training gives them, as I readily recognise, a superiority to the old-fashioned Nana which cannot be contested. In any case, whether she be old-or new-fashioned, the English nurse is supreme. She is in demand all over Europe, she condescends to South America, and is worth her weight in gold in those far lands of the Empire where the one drawback to serving the state is that it makes the proper rearing of children an almost insoluble problem. To account for this superiority of the English nurse is not so easy, for her obviously high place in the ranks of good Englishwomen would, one might suppose, not be so obvious to dwellers in foreign lands, whose women, it is to be presumed, are fond enough of children and better acquainted with the climate and constitutions of their own country than a foreigner could be. A desire to implant early in their offspring a colloquial knowledge of our language cannot be the only reason why foreign parents engage English nurses. One of the real reasons is, I am sure, that the English nurse knows how to combine friendliness with discipline: it is a gift recognised in other relations as supremely belonging to the Englishman. Her pride, also, which stands out against undue interference by the parents in her administration of the nursery is another good reason. Nurses in other countries, I suspect, are apt to humour children too much, to spoil them themselves and to allow the parents to outrage to any extent the proved rules and traditions of infant hygiene, to dress them up and make dolls of them instead of treating them as the immature little animals that they are, to take them out and give them unwholesome food at restaurants, and, in general, to involve them too