No subject interests Miss Nightingale more to-day than that of district nursing. She inquires minutely into the experiences of those engaged amongst the sick poor. “Are the people improving in their habits?” is a question she often asks, or again, “Tell me about these model dwellings, which they are putting up everywhere. Have they had a good effect on the personal habits of the people?” If a Sister chances to mention some new invalid appliance, the old keen interest comes to the surface and Miss Nightingale will have it all explained to her, even to the place where the apparatus was procured. [Illustration: MISS NIGHTINGALE. (_From a memory sketch._) [_To face p. 340._ ] The popularity of nursing as a profession is another topic of great interest to Miss Nightingale, and when she hears of more applications to enter the Training Home at St. Thomas’s than the Council can entertain, she recalls the very different state of things when she used in the early days to issue her urgent call for recruits. While she is particularly anxious that a high standard of character and efficiency should be maintained amongst nurses, she keeps strictly to her original attitude that “a nurse should be a nurse and not a medical woman.” Miss Nightingale feels that ability to pass a technical examination does not necessarily prove that a woman will make a good nurse. It is a profession in which natural aptitude and personal character count for a great deal; to use a familiar axiom, a nurse is “born, not made.” Often Miss Nightingale’s mind travels back to her old Derbyshire home. Embley has passed out of the family, but Lea Hurst is occupied by a relative, Mrs. William Shore Nightingale, and Miss Nightingale keeps up her interest in the old people of the place. In August, 1903, the late Hon. Frederick Strutt, the Mayor of Derby and a distant cousin of Miss Nightingale’s, entertained the nurses of the borough at Lea Hurst, which was specially lent for the occasion, and Miss Nightingale, hearing of what was about to take place, wrote the following letter to Mr. Strutt: “Will you,” she said, “express to each and to all of them my very warmest wishes for their very highest success, in the best meaning of the word, in the life’s work which they have chosen. We hear a great deal nowadays about nursing as a profession, but the question for each nurse is, ‘Am I living up to my profession?’ The nurse’s life is above all a moral and practical life--a life not of show, but of practical action. I wish the nurses God-speed in their work, and may each one strive with the best that is in her to act up to her profession, and to rise continually to a higher level of thought and practice, character and dutifulness.”