th all there is to be done. Faith, Hope, and Charity
are all we have to help us, all we can ask of Heaven. Believe, hope,
and help others while you live, and all will go well hereafter, never
fear! Not to help, not to believe, not to hope, even during one
moment, is to fail in that moment. Where the sum is light, it is easy
to count the dark places, but not the light itself. That is what I
mean, my daughter, when I say, keep account of your failures but not
of your successes. Try to remember it.'

'Indeed I will,' Angela answered.

She went back to her work, and the Mother Superior's words thereafter
became the rule of her life; but she was not sent for again to listen
to a lecture on vanity, and the small White Volcano was inclined to
think that it had made a mistake in breaking out, and inwardly offered
a conditional apology.

Angela worked hard, and made such progress that before the two years
of her noviciate were over Doctor Pieri said openly that she was the
best surgical nurse in the hospital, and one of the best for ordinary
illnesses, considering how limited her experience had been. The
nursing of wounds is more mechanical than the nursing of a fever, for
instance, and can be sooner learned by a beginner, where the surgeon
himself is always at hand. On the other hand, the value of surgical
nursing depends on relative perfection of detail and rigorous
adherence to the set rules of prophylaxis, whereas other nursing often
requires that judgment which only experience can give. Surgery is a
fine art that has reached a high degree of development in the
treatment of facts, about which good surgeons are generally right. A
great deal of noise is made over surgeons' occasional mistakes, which
are advertised by their detractors, but we hear little of their steady
and almost constant success. Medicine, on the other hand, must very
often proceed by guesswork; but for that very reason it covers up its
defects more anxiously, and is more inclined to talk loudly of its
victories. Every great physician admits that a good deal of his
science is psychological; and psychology deals with the unknown, or
with what is only partially knowable. A mathematician may smile and
answer that 'infinity' is much more than partially 'unknowable,' but
that, by using it, the differential calculus gives results of most
amazing accuracy, and is such a simple affair that, if its mere name
did not inspire terror, any fourth-form schoolboy could e