The management of the child when ill is difficult or easy in exact proportion to whether it has been ill or well managed when in health. The mother who lives but little with her children, who contents herself with a daily visit to the nursery, and who then scarcely sees her little ones until they are brought into the drawing-room in the evening in full dress, to be petted and admired and fondled by the visitors, cannot expect to take her place by the child's bed in its sickness, to soothe its pain, and to expend upon it all the pent-up tenderness which, in spite of the calls of business or of pleasure, still dwells within her heart. She must be content to see the infant turn from her to the nurse with whose face it has all its life been familiar; or to hear the little one tell her to go away, for her presence is associated with none of those 'familiar acts, made beautiful by love,' which win the young heart: the mother is but a stranger who brings no help, who relieves no distress. Happy such a mother if she has found a conscientious and intelligent nurse to whom she can delegate her office; but she must remember that with the child, love follows in the steps of daily, hourly kindnesses, that a mother's part must be played in health if it is to be undertaken in sickness, that it cannot be laid down and taken up again at pleasure. There is another mother who cannot nurse her child to any good purpose, she who when it was well spoilt it from excess of love, who has yielded to each wayward wish, and has allowed it to become the petty tyrant of the household. The child is ill, it is languid, feverish, and in pain; no position is quite easy to it, no food pleasant to it, bed is irksome, medicine is nasty. It knows only that it suffers, it has been accustomed to have its will obeyed in everything, and cannot understand that its suffering is not at once taken away. It insists on getting up and on being dressed, or on lying in its mother's or nurse's lap, where the warmth of another person's body does but aggravate its fever; it screams with passion at the approach of the doctor, it will not allow itself to be examined, it will take no medicine; the doctor is powerless, the mother heart-broken. Sickness is not the time to exercise authority which has not been put in force before; and, not once but many times, I have watched, a sad spectator, the death of children from an illness not necessarily fatal, but rendered so because it was impossible to learn the progress of disease, impossible to administer the necessary remedies. _What a child has been made when well, such it will be when sick._