very short time was able
easily to follow the sermon. This was a great enjoyment to her, as she
much valued the truly evangelical teaching at Kaiserswerth.

At the end of three months of steady work, she spent a few days with an
uncle and aunt who were staying at Bonn, but the gay boarding-house life
contrasted so unfavourably with the happy Christian fellowship at
Kaiserswerth, that she was thankful to return to her duties, playfully
writing:--"The nun will not soon again leave her cell, for it was with
very nun-like feelings she met the world again." Yet she was no
misanthrope. She did not bring to God a heart which had tried earth's
pleasures and had found them wanting, nor a life jaded with pursuing
them. From the first, she had cast aside the love of worldly things, and
had chosen to be wholly the Lord's.

During the latter part of her stay at Kaiserswerth, her duties lay
entirely in the hospital. In January she wrote:--"My duties are in the
children's hospital, all ages from two to twelve. It is a new life for
me in a nursery of sick children, and a busy one too, for every moment
they want something done for them."

A month or so later she was appointed superintendent of the boys'
hospital, a post of peculiar responsibility and difficulty. It was one,
too, from which she shrank, holding the mistaken idea that she possessed
no powers of government. Certainly it was a position to tax the
patience, for the children were not too ill to be noisy and disobedient,
or even sometimes to unite in open rebellion, while the task was not
rendered easier by the necessity of speaking in a foreign tongue.

Altogether she had a very busy life. She rose at 5.O A.M. every day, and
kept hard at work, with the exception of the intervals for meals and the
_Stille Stunde_ (quiet hour), until night. "The cleaning and keeping my
dominion in order is such a business," she writes. "Sweeping and washing
the floor of the three rooms every morning, two stoves which must be
black-leaded weekly, each taking an hour, weekly cleaning of windows,
tins, dinner-chests, washing-up of bandages, &c., besides the washing-up
after each of our five meals, keeps one busy." She must have been strong
in those days, for she wrote:--"I come over from the other house every
morning at six, the ground white and windows frozen over; often at three
in the afternoon the water outside is still frozen, yet night or morning
I never put on bonnet or handkerchief, unl