tored her appetite. After her anger had subsided, she thanked the
superintendent with all her heart, and from that day she began to learn
the difference between true and false sympathy. It took her some time,
however, to get thoroughly established in the habit of healthy
sympathy. The tendency to unwholesome sympathy was part of her natural
inheritance, along with many other evil tendencies which frequently
have to be overcome before a person with a very sensitive nervous
system can find his own true strength. But as she watched the useless
suffering which resulted in all cases in which people allowed
themselves to be weakened by the pain of others, she learned to
understand more and more intelligently the practice of wholesome
sympathy, and worked until it had become her second nature. Especially
did she do this after having proved many times, by practical
experience, the strength which comes through the power of wholesome
sympathy to those in pain.

Unwholesome sympathy incapacitates one for serving others, whether the
need be physical, mental, or moral. Wholesome sympathy not only gives
us power to serve, but clears our understanding; and, because of our
growing ability to appreciate rightly the point of view of other
people, our service can be more and more intelligent.

In contrast to this unwholesome sympathy, which is the cause of more
trouble in the world than people generally suppose, is the unwholesome
lack of sympathy, or hardening process, which is deliberately
cultivated by many people, and which another story will serve to
illustrate.

A poor negro was once brought to the hospital very ill; he had suffered
so keenly in the process of getting there that the resulting weakness,
together with the intense fright at the idea of being in a hospital,
which is so common to many of his class, added to the effects of his
disease itself, were too much for him, and he died before he had been
in bed fifteen minutes. The nurse in charge looked at him and said, in
a cold, steady tone:--

"It was hardly worth while to make up the bed."

She had hardened herself because she could not endure the suffering of
unwholesome sympathy, and yet "must do her work." No one had taught her
the freedom and power of true sympathy. Her finer senses were dulled
and atrophied,--she did not know the difference between one human soul
and another. She only knew that this was a case of typhoid fever, that
a case of pneumonia, and another