nun. She is softer, kinder, gayer, and more delicate and modest in her handling of a patient than the average lady nurse of England. She nurses you for love of nursing, or for the good of her soul, and she has the secret of a boundless sympathy and untiring good-will. Yet many scientific Frenchmen and doctors, while praising her disinterestedness and purity of motive, allow her unsatisfactory peculiarities. For instance, they complain of her indocility to the doctor and surgeon, and state that when a difference of opinion between them and the mother superior arises, the religious sick nurses will obey the latter rather than those in whose hands lies the fate of the patient. Dr. Fauvel, of le Hâvre, stated before the International Congress of Assistance, relative to the laity of the new hospital of that town: "As regards primary instruction and professional education, the nuns are in no wise superior, quite the contrary; with an incomplete professional education, the lay staff has shown special knowledge ignored by the nuns, nursing the sick with greater intimate skill, preparing instruments, baths, helping the doctors and pupils more efficiently, being more docile in taking the thousand precautions ordered in operations and the dressing of wounds. . . . It is a mistake to regard as false all the accusations made against the sisters; and I declare emphatically that I have found in lay nurses an
