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The Victorian f Nurses The Child Who is “Differcnt"

BY AGNES JOYNES, V.0.N.

weather we have had. A parboiled group, they gather around the table every morning. When one asks another to pass anything at table, it is passed with an oh-I-wish-you’d—stop- bothering-me expression, which makes the asker think perhaps it would be better to walk around after it the next time. Each seems to be wondering where the energy for the day’s work is coming

OUR nurses begin to show the strain of the long spell of hot

from,—the energy to carry a heavy handbag through the red-hot ‘

streets, and to stoop for hours over low beds in rooms so close that the poor patient is gasping for breath. Each one hopes that the

work, which has been heavy «of late, will by some happy chance

lighten a little. Hoping against hope, for we know that this same weather is making new patients for us every hour in the day.

“If I had life enough,” said one girl at dinner to-day, “I should be worrying about a certain condition which we meet so often and which I am ‘up against’ just now.”

“Stop worrying about conditions!” was the quick retort from another part of the table, “and you’ll have more life. Stop worry- ing yourself and make other people worry a little—those people who have the power to do things, and you will accomplish some- thing.”

“What has put the latest wrinkle in your brow?” asks a moth- erly voice from somewhere else. And the nurse tells her story:

She has just come from a home where her patient, the mother of a large family, was in tears because one of her children could not “get on” in school. The teacher of the busy public school which he attended was having “a terrible time” with him. A neighbor had been tactfully intimating that the child had no brains, or Was defective, which the mother considered about the same thing. She declared that he was not defective, he was only “dif- ferent,” and if she had the time, she was sure she could teach him.

She had produced some quite unusual mechanism of the child’s invention and asked: “Could a child Without brains do that?” She knew, she said, that he was different from the rest of the family; but she also knew that in some ways he was the brightest one of

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