Under the heading of “Chattering Hopes and Advices,” Miss Nightingale evidently speaks out of the fulness of her own experience. “‘Chattering Hopes,’” she says, “may seem an odd heading. But I really believe there is scarcely a greater worry which invalids have to endure than the incurable hopes of their friends. There is no one practice against which I can speak more strongly from actual experience, wide and long, of its effects during sickness, observed both upon others and upon myself. I would appeal most seriously to all friends, visitors, and attendants of the sick to leave off this practice of attempting to ‘cheer’ the sick by making light of their danger and by exaggerating their probabilities of recovery.... The fact is that the patient is not ‘cheered’ at all by these well-meaning, most tiresome friends.” The advice or opinion of the experienced does not of course come under the head of “Chattering Hopes,” but it is the advice of “inexperience to bitter experience” which Miss Nightingale condemns, and which amounts to nothing more than this, “that you think I shall recover from consumption, because somebody knows somebody, somewhere, who has recovered from fever.” Nurses should protect their patients from visitors of the class indicated. The “Observation of the Sick” is a quality which needs cultivation. “The most important practical lesson that can be given to nurses is to teach them what to observe,” writes Miss Nightingale, also “how to observe,” and to accurately state the result of observation. It is a more difficult thing to speak the truth than people commonly imagine. “Courts of justice seem to think that anybody can speak ‘the whole truth and nothing but the truth,’ if he does but intend it.” It requires many faculties combined of observation and memory to do that. She quotes a little incident to illustrate the point. “I know I fibs dreadful; but believe me, miss, I never finds out I have fibbed until they tells me so,” was a remark once made to her, which is, as she says, “one of more extended application than most people have the least idea of.” Needless to say, unintentional “fibbing,” or in other words lack of observation, which leads a nurse to wrongly inform the doctor regarding the patient, often leads to disastrous results. “I knew,” says Miss Nightingale, “a very clever physician of large dispensary and hospital practice, who invariably began his examination of a patient with ‘Put your finger where you _be_ bad.’ That man would never waste his time with collecting inaccurate information from nurse or patient.” Nothing leads to inaccurate information more than putting “leading questions” to sick people. “How do you sleep?” “How is your appetite?” A tactful and observant nurse will be better able to answer such questions than the patient himself.