After dealing with household hygiene in chapters on “Ventilating and Warming,” and “Health of Houses,” she proceeds to consider the bad results of “Petty Management,” under which heading the want of relays of nurses is dealt with both in institutions and in private homes. A tired, jaded nurse is almost worse than no nurse at all. The nurse must have needed rest; still, the patient should not be left alone. “I once heard a neglectful official rebuked,” says Miss Nightingale, “in the words, ‘Patients, sir, will not stop dying while we are in church.’” The subject of “Noise” gives Miss Nightingale the occasion to speak plainly on the dress of the amateur nurse. She wrote in the days of crinolines, but her strictures would equally apply to the woman who in modern times gets her long skirts entangled in the furniture, and creates as much noise and upset in the sick chamber as did the nurse of the olden days with her crinoline. Miss Nightingale endorses Lord Melbourne’s sentiments when he said: “I would rather have men about me when I am ill. I think it requires very strong health to put up with women.” It was “the fidget of silk and crinoline, the crackling of starched petticoats, the creaking of stays and shoes,” which led Lord Melbourne to make this ungallant observation. Miss Nightingale advises the private woman called upon to nurse in her own family to copy the neat, trim style of dressing adopted by the professional nurse. Her manner should be as motionless as possible. “Never gesticulate when speaking to the sick,” cultivate conciseness and calmness, and avoid an irresolute manner. The chapter on “Variety” deals in a beautiful and sympathetic spirit with the effect of colour and variety of objects on the sick person. “The effect in sickness,” she writes, “of beautiful objects, of variety of objects, and especially of brilliancy of colour, is hardly at all appreciated. Such cravings are not fancies.... Variety of form and brilliancy of colour in the objects presented to patients are actual means of recovery,” and she recalls her own case, already quoted, when a nosegay of wild-flowers brought to her hut on the heights of Balaclava, where she lay with fever, seemed to put new life into her. “Form and colour,” she says, “will free your patient from his painful ideas better than any argument.” People say it is the effect on the patient’s mind. It is no such thing; the effect is on the body too. While variety in objects is necessary, “it must be a _slow_ variety; don’t show a patient ten or twelve engravings successively.” One fresh picture a day hung on his wall or brought to his bedside will be more appreciated.