She goes on to speak of the longing of women for work and the _ennui_ which results from the lack of it, and draws the picture of five or six daughters living in well-to-do houses with no other occupation than taking a class in a Sunday-school and of the middle-class girls who become burdensome to fathers and brothers. She expends some characteristic witticisms on the young ladies who try to drive away _ennui_ by a little parish visiting, and because of their want of knowledge only succeed in demoralising the poor. In evidence of this, Miss Nightingale tells the story that one day on entering a cottage which was usually neat and tidy she found everything upside down. “La! now! why, miss,” said the cottage woman at her visitor’s look of astonishment, “when the district-visiting ladies comes, if we didn’t put everything topsy-turvy they would not give us anything.” “To be able to visit _well_,” says Miss Nightingale, commenting upon the foregoing incident, “is one of the rarest accomplishments. But when attained, what a blessing to both visitors and visited!” These remarks in regard to the work of women were by way of preliminary to introducing the subject of deaconesses. Miss Nightingale had returned from Kaiserswerth full of enthusiasm for the vocation of trained nurse and visitor to the poor, and was endeavouring to introduce the then highly novel subject to her young countrywomen as a way of getting rid of listlessness and _ennui_. That she felt the ground to be dangerous is shown by the detailed account of the connection of the office of a deaconess with the early Christian Church, which she deemed it necessary to give in order to allay the Protestant fear that a deaconess was a nun in disguise. In these days, when women are actively employed in Church work and philanthropy, and when their assistance is welcomed by the clergy in parishes all over the land, it seems strange to find how cautiously Miss Nightingale recommended the office of deaconess. She labours through scholastic arguments and cites the Fathers. St. Chrysostom speaks of forty deaconesses at work in Constantinople in the fourth century. Holy women of the order worked amongst the Waldensian, Bohemian and Moravian Brotherhoods. Luther complained of the lack of deaconesses in his neighbourhood, adding, “Women have especial graces to alleviate woe, and the words of women move the human being more than those of men.” Under Queen Elizabeth, deaconesses were instituted into the Protestant Church during public service. The Pilgrim Fathers when first driven to Amsterdam and Leyden carried their deaconesses with them, and Miss Nightingale cites the improving example of the Amsterdam deaconess who sat in her place at church with a little birchen rod in her hand to correct the children, and relates how she called upon the young maidens for their services, when they were sick, and she was “obeyed like a mother in Israel.”