those who have little "to think of."
There are many burthened with business who always manage to keep a
pigeon-hole in their minds, full of things to tell the "invalid."

I do not say, don't tell him your anxieties--I believe it is good for
him and good for you too; but if you tell him what is anxious, surely
you can remember to tell him what is pleasant too.

A sick person does so enjoy hearing good news:--for instance, of a love
and courtship, while in progress to a good ending. If you tell him only
when the marriage takes place, he loses half the pleasure, which God
knows he has little enough of; and ten to one but you have told him of
some love-making with a bad ending.

A sick person also intensely enjoys hearing of any _material_ good, any
positive or practical success of the right. He has so much of books and
fiction, of principles, and precepts, and theories; do, instead of
advising him with advice he has heard at least fifty times before, tell
him of one benevolent act which has really succeeded practically,--it is
like a day's health to him.[2]

You have no idea what the craving of sick with undiminished power of
thinking, but little power of doing, is to hear of good practical
action, when they can no longer partake in it.

Do observe these things with the sick. Do remember how their life is to
them disappointed and incomplete. You see them lying there with
miserable disappointments, from which they can have no escape but death,
and you can't remember to tell them of what would give them so much
pleasure, or at least an hour's variety.

They don't want you to be lachrymose and whining with them, they like
you to be fresh and active and interested, but they cannot bear absence
of mind, and they are so tired of the advice and preaching they receive
from everybody, no matter whom it is, they see.

There is no better society than babies and sick people for one another.
Of course you must manage this so that neither shall suffer from it,
which is perfectly possible. If you think the "air of the sick room" bad
for the baby, why it is bad for the invalid too, and, therefore, you
will of course correct it for both. It freshens up a sick person's whole
mental atmosphere to see "the baby." And a very young child, if
unspoiled, will generally adapt itself wonderfully to the ways of a sick
person, if the time they spend together is not too long.

If you knew how unreasonably sick people suffer from reasonable ca