wo
things are certain:--

[Sidenote: Read aloud slowly, distinctly, and steadily to the sick.]

(1.) If there is some matter which _must_ be read to a sick person, do
it slowly. People often think that the way to get it over with least
fatigue to him is to get it over in least time. They gabble; they plunge
and gallop through the reading. There never was a greater mistake.
Houdin, the conjuror, says that the way to make a story seem short is to
tell it slowly. So it is with reading to the sick. I have often heard a
patient say to such a mistaken reader, "Don't read it to me; tell it
me."[4] Unconsciously he is aware that this will regulate the plunging,
the reading with unequal paces, slurring over one part, instead of
leaving it out altogether, if it is unimportant, and mumbling another.
If the reader lets his own attention wander, and then stops to read up
to himself, or finds he has read the wrong bit, then it is all over with
the poor patient's chance of not suffering. Very few people know how to
read to the sick; very few read aloud as pleasantly even as they speak.
In reading they sing, they hesitate, they stammer, they hurry, they
mumble; when in speaking they do none of these things. Reading aloud to
the sick ought always to be rather slow, and exceedingly distinct, but
not mouthing--rather monotonous, but not sing song--rather loud but not
noisy--and, above all, not too long. Be very sure of what your patient
can bear.

[Sidenote: Never read aloud by fits and starts to the sick.]

(2.) The extraordinary habit of reading to oneself in a sick room, and
reading aloud to the patient any bits which will amuse him or more often
the reader, is unaccountably thoughtless. What _do_ you think the
patient is thinking of during your gaps of non-reading? Do you think
that he amuses himself upon what you have read for precisely the time it
pleases you to go on reading to yourself, and that his attention is
ready for something else at precisely the time it pleases you to begin
reading again? Whether the person thus read to be sick or well, whether
he be doing nothing or doing something else while being thus read to,
the self-absorption and want of observation of the person who does it,
is equally difficult to understand--although very often the read_ee_ is
too amiable to say how much it hurts him.

[Sidenote: People overhead.]

One thing more:--From, the flimsy manner in which most modern houses are
built, where