Another picture. I was called one night to attend a lady in her fifth confinement. The husband had come for me and leaving me at the door of his home had gone for the nurse. On entering, I found the only attendant of the mother, her twelve year old son. With her hands in his, and his face full of sympathy and anxiety for her suffering, he was giving her all the assistance that he could. Quiet and dignified he left the room as I entered, but not before I had read in his face the lesson that had sunk into his very soul; that mothers suffered for their children, and for this should have all the love and tender consideration they could give them. He was not an attractive boy, nor a tractable one, but the dear mother had taken the very safest means to hold him to herself, and a mother-anchored boy or girl will not go far wrong. So much for some retrospects of the birth chamber, and now to the plain practical knowledge needed for those who are to experience its realities. In reckoning the period of gestation the rule most easily followed is this. Add seven days to the date of the last menstruation, and count ahead nine months, or backward three months, and you have the probable time of confinement. Should you pass this time you would probably go on for two weeks, as the most susceptible times for conception to take place are in the week following menstruation or a couple of days preceding the next period; which makes a difference of two weeks in the calculation. If the bowels have been kept open by proper diet and care, and if the patient has kept up her daily exercise and baths, she will come to the birth chamber well prepared and it need have no terrors for her. To-day when anæsthetics are given as a rule, not an exception, the chief bugbear of the parturient is lost or charmed away. It does not need that the anæsthetic be given to a surgical degree, but simply sufficient to take away the severity of the pain. I have found for the lying-in room the most satisfactory anæsthetic to be the one, two, three, mixture; by which I mean a mixture of alcohol, chloroform, and ether, in the proportion of one part of alcohol, two parts of chloroform, and three parts of ether. These parts may be varied however as the attending physician desires. It is not a quick anæsthetic, but serves every purpose needed, unless full anæsthesia is sought. The patient can manage this herself, and it thus serves two purposes, giving her something beside her discomfort to think of, and taking away the pain so that there is little left to think about.