to be happy is to feel
that you are wanted and you cause happiness in others; in a word, that
somebody is glad and grateful that you are alive. I know I should find
a great deal of happiness in nursing. I have had to deal with nurses in
France during nine months in a military hospital after the Commune,
when a compatriot of mine, an insurgent, of whom I never had the
pleasure of making the personal acquaintance, shot me in the arm, and
also in Great Britain, during a severe illness which I contracted in
the North of Scotland, far away from home.

Nurses look all cheerful and happy, and the beauty of their faces, in
England, is enhanced, I must say, by a pleasing, very becoming
semi-nunlike attire, that gives them a peculiar charm which you find in
no other women. There is engraven on their faces that joy of living
which Heaven seems to stamp upon the faces of women who devote
themselves to the well-being and happiness of their fellow-creatures
and to the assuaging of their pains and sufferings. Yes, nurses all
look beautiful, and if I were a woman, theirs is the kind of beauty
which I should like to possess.

I remember seeing one by the death-bed of a little girl whom she had
tenderly nursed, standing at the bedside, motionless, beautiful in her
impassive grace, and looking like one of those angels that painters
delight in representing at the bedside of children whose souls they
have come to bear to the abode of the seraphim.

Another thing that would induce me to embrace that profession--or
vocation I ought rather to call it--is the absolute freedom that nurses
enjoy. Their very dress inspires respect in all alike, high and low.
They can go wherever they like with their uniform on--into a first tier
box at the opera or into the lowest slums of the city. Everybody will
stand back to let them pass; all will throw at them a glance of
sympathy and admiration. The upper tens treat the nurse like the lady
that she is, the submerged ones like the angel that brings them a ray
of sunshine. The nurse may be ever so beautiful, the worst roue in the
street will not only never think of following her, much less annoying
her by his loathsome assiduities, but he will allow her to pass
unnoticed in perfect freedom and security, and will not unlikely leave
the pavement to make room for her. I believe that the pickpocket in an
omnibus would hesitate to help himself to her purse, even if that light
companion of hers made itself conspi