ter, affecting, in the
spectacle of this tall, commanding soldier painting with little loving
comic touches the portrait of the old Malapropian lady with her heart of
gold. That was a few short months ago, and to-day E. B. lies in a French
grave.

Malapropisms and old nurses are, of course, inseparable. Indeed, they
formed again the basis of our talk the other evening, each of us having
a new example to give, all drawn from memories of childhood. Wonderful
how these quaint phrases stick--due, I suppose, to the fact that the
child does not hear too much to confuse it, and when in this tenacious
stage notices the sharp differences between the conversation of the
literate, as encountered in the dining-room and drawing-room, and the
much more amusing illiteracy below stairs. It will be a bad day for
England when education is so prevalent that nursemaids have it too. Much
less interesting will the backward look then become.

How far forward we have moved in general social decency one realizes
after listening to such conversations as I have hinted at, where respect
and affection dominate, and then turning to some of the children's books
of a century ago--the kind of book in which the parents are always
right and made in God's image, and the children full of faults. In one
of these I found recently a story of a little girl who, being rude and
wilful with her maid, was rebuked by her kind and wise mamma in some
such phrase as, "Although it has pleased the Almighty to set you and
Sarah in such different positions, you have no right to be unjust to
her."

Reflecting upon how great a change has come upon the relation of
employers and employed, and how much greater a change is in store, it
seems to me that one of the good human kinds of book that does not at
present exist, and ought to be made, would bring together between two
covers some of the best servants in history, public and private, and
possibly in literature too. Nurses first, because the nurse is so much
more important a factor in family life, and because, to my mind, she has
never had honour enough. I doubt if enough honour could be paid to her,
but the attempt has not been sufficiently made. And to-day, of course,
the very word as I am using it has only a secondary meaning. By "nurse"
to-day we mean first a cool, smiling woman, with a white cap and
possibly a red cross, ministering to the wounded and the sick. We have
to think twice in order to evoke the guardian ang