ion there appears to be
no chance. Strange, though true, that people should be just the same in
these things as they were a few hundred years ago!

To me these commonplaces, leaving their smear upon the cheerful,
single-hearted, constant devotion to duty, which is so often seen in the
decline of such sufferers, recall the slimy trail left by the snail on
the sunny southern garden-wall loaded with fruit.

[Sidenote: Mockery of the advice given to sick.]

No mockery in the world is so hollow as the advice showered upon the
sick. It is of no use for the sick to say anything, for what the adviser
wants is, _not_ to know the truth about the state of the patient, but to
turn whatever the sick may say to the support of his own argument, set
forth, it must be repeated, without any inquiry whatever into the
patient's real condition. "But it would be impertinent or indecent in me
to make such an inquiry," says the adviser. True; and how much more
impertinent is it to give your advice when you can know nothing about
the truth, and admit you could not inquire into it.

To nurses I say--these are the visitors who do your patient harm. When
you hear him told:--1. That he has nothing the matter with him, and that
he wants cheering. 2. That he is committing suicide, and that he wants
preventing. 3. That he is the tool of somebody who makes use of him for
a purpose. 4. That he will listen to nobody, but is obstinately bent
upon his own way; and 5. That, he ought to be called to a sense of duty,
and is flying in the face of Providence;--then know that your patient is
receiving all the injury that he can receive from a visitor.

How little the real sufferings of illness are known or understood. How
little does any one in good health fancy him or even _her_self into the
life of a sick person.

[Sidenote: Means of giving pleasure to the sick.]

Do, you who are about the sick or who visit the sick, try and give them
pleasure, remember to tell them what will do so. How often in such
visits the sick person has to do the whole conversation, exerting his
own imagination and memory, while you would take the visitor, absorbed
in his own anxieties, making no effort of memory or imagination, for the
sick person. "Oh! my dear, I have so much to think of, I really quite
forgot to tell him that; besides, I thought he would know it," says the
visitor to another friend. How could "he know it?" Depend upon it, the
people who say this are really