The child lives in the present, not in the future, nor much even in the past, till the world has been some time with him, and he by degrees shares the common heritage of retrospect and anticipation. This is the great secret of the quiet happiness which strikes almost all visitors to a children's hospital. No one can have watched the sick bed of the child without remarking the almost unvarying patience with which its illness is borne, and the extremity of peril from which apparently, in consequence of that patience, a complete recovery takes place. Much, indeed, is no doubt due to the activity of the reparative powers in early life, but much also to the unruffled quiet of the mind. No sorrow for the past, no gloomy foreboding of the future, no remorse, disappointment, nor anxiety depresses the spirits and enfeebles the vital powers. The prospect of death, even when its approach is realised--and this is not so rare as some may imagine--brings in general but small alarm. This may be from the vagueness of the child's ideas; it may be, as the poet says, that in his short life's journey, 'the heaven that lies about us in our infancy' has been so much with him, that he recognises more clearly than we can do 'The glories he hath known, And that imperial palace whence he came.' I dwell on this truth, because it is of great practical moment that we should bear in mind to how very large an extent the child lives only in the present; because it follows from it that to keep the sick child happy; to remove from it all avoidable causes of alarm, of suffering, of discomfort; to avoid, as far as may be, any direct struggle with its waywardness; and even if death seems likely to occur, to look at it from a child's point of view--not from that which our larger understanding of good and evil suggests to our minds--are duties of the gravest kind which weigh on the parent and the nurse, no less than on the physician.