rebuke to the egotism, or the sentimentality, which has led several ladies to imagine that they could be nurses, without having tried whether they could bear the discipline. Her pure, undisguised common sense, and her keen perception of all deviations from common sense, may have turned back more or fewer women from the nursing vocation: but this is probably an unmixed good; for those who could be thus turned back were obviously unfit to proceed. She is the representative of those only who are nurses; that is, capable of the hardest and highest duties and sacrifices which women can undertake from love to their race.
In the end she will have won over far more than she can have (most righteously and mercifully) discouraged. Generations of women, for centuries to come, will be the better, the more helpful, and the more devoted for Florence Nightingale having lived; and no small number of each generation will try their strength on that difficult path of beneficence which she has opened, and on which her image will for ever stand to show the way.
AN HONEST ARAB.
We had been on a fishing tour in the Highlands, and, en route to town, were idling a day or two in “the grey metropolis of the north.” “Scotchman, Xpress, Merkerry, Fewzees, penny a hunder—this day’s Scotchman, sir!” shouted a shrill-piped, ragged little imp at the fag end of a cold, wet, bitter day in October, as we stood blowing a cloud at the door of the New Royal in Princes Street.
“No, we don’t want any.”
“Fewzees, penny a hunder, sir; this day’s paper, sir—half price, sir—only a bawbee;” persisted the young countryman of Adam Smith, as the market showed symptoms of decline, and threatened to close decidedly flat.
“Get along, Bird’s-eye, don’t want any,” growled Phillips.
“They’re gude fewzees, sir, penny a hunder.”
“Don’t smoke,” Phillips, loquitur, whif, whif, whif.
“They’re gude fewzees, sir, hunder and twenty for a penny, sir,” coming round on my flank.
“No, don’t want ’em, my boy.”
The keen blue face, red bare feet ingrained with dirt, and bundle of scanty rags looked piteously up at me, moved off a little, but still hovered round us. Now, when I put down my first subscription to the One Tun Ragged School in Westminster, I took a mental pledge from myself to encourage vagrant children in the streets no more.