myself up to my old delight in nursing. But it is a horrible disease,
diptheria, and the suffering of the patient is frightful to witness. I
shall never forget the poor little girl's black parched lips and gasping
breath.

Scarcely was she convalescent, when the youngest boy, a fine, strong,
healthy little fellow, sickened with scarlet fever. We elders held a
consultation, and decided to isolate the top floor from the rest of the
house, and to nurse the little lad there; it seemed almost hopeless to
prevent such a disease from spreading through a family of children, but
our vigorous measures were successful, and none other suffered. I was
voted to the post of nurse, and installed myself promptly, taking up the
carpets, turning out the curtains, and across the door ways hanging
sheets which I kept always wet with chloride of lime. My meals were
brought upstairs and put on the landing outside; my patient and I
remained completely isolated, until the disease had run its course; and
when all risk was over, I proudly handed over my charge, the disease
touching no other member of the flock.

It was a strange time, those weeks of the autumn and early winter in Mr.
Woodward's house. He was a remarkably good man, very religious and to a
very remarkable extent not "of this world". A "priest" to the tips of his
finger-nails, and looking on his priestly office as the highest a man
could fill, he yet held it always as one which put him at the service of
the poorest who needed help. He was very good to me, and, while deeply
lamenting my "perversion", held, by some strange unpriestlike charity,
that my "unbelief" was but a passing cloud, sent as trial by "the Lord",
and soon to vanish again, leaving me in the "sunshine of faith". He
marvelled much, I learned afterwards, where I gained my readiness to work
heartily for others, and to remain serenely content amid the roughnesses