when, owing to the medical recess, it was difficult
to get additional assistance. Short hours
of rest and constant work under confinement in
the fever wards, caused the medical officer
himself to be laid on his back with fever, by the
time help could be got. Then, the recess being
over, it was not difficult to find a young soldier
in the war against a dread disease, willing to
meet the certainty of a wound, and the chance
of its being a fatal one, in the cause of humanity.
An assistant was given to him. Before the
resident officer, whose place was then for a time
supplied, had recovered from the attack by which
he had been prostrated, his substitute was already
down, and when the first resident officer was
ready to return to the fight, the assistant was
down too. A substitute who took that gentleman's
place, was in three weeks a dead man, and
the assistant himself got up only to be again
knocked down by the disease. He has at last
been forced to retire, crippled for a time only,
we trust, by the enemy. His place was filled
immediately by another fearless volunteer.
Surely there are no men-at-arms who fight more
truly and heroically the battles of their country
than the hard-pressed medical officers of a place
like this, who, when nine-tenths of the London
world have been three or four hours a-bed, pass
through the prostrate ranks of the fever-smitten,
before retiring to the short and often broken
rest that must refresh them for another day of
battle with the grim destroyer. The bright
moonlight, perhaps, that floods in through the
ample windows, overpowers the night glimmer
of gaslight in the spacious wards, and lies pale
and quiet among ghostly shadows of its own
making upon the floor, and upon the beds whence
rise inarticulate mutterings of the fevered sleeper,
or delirious cries of the wakeful, street cries,
perhaps, from the sick costermonger, who
supposes himself to be abroad earning his children's
bread, or the plaintive child cry after " Mother,"
from little lips whose speech will never
again upon earth make their fond music for a
mother's ears. Or from the open space about
the hospital the whole force of the night gale
is to be heard and felt as it sweeps round the
building with a clatter and a moan, to which the
voices of delirium within blend themselves
strangely, and the weird feeling that oppresses
the weary soldier of humanity as he labours at
such times upon his battle-field, is relieved only
by the tranquil and homely figures of the nurses,
who continually move about with jugs of beef-
tea, egg-flip, and other needful supports of the
sick against the wasting power of their enemy.

These nurses, too, risk life in the performance
of a necessary and a noble duty. During the
last year sixteen of them were struck down by
typhus. Three of the sixteen died, most of the
others are at their good work again, and form
part of the seasoned staff of nurses, who are, so
to speak, acclimatised to the conditions under
which they work. Deplorable as is the loss of
any one of them, it is to be borne in mind that
this mortality among nurses at the Fever
Hospital is very low in proportion to that which
happened during the same year at the few
general hospitals which admit a limited number
of fever eases into their wards.

To give their nurses the best chance of health,
the Fever Hospital Committee has resolved to
build for them fresh dormitories, so that
upwards of six hundred cubic feet may be allowed
to each occupant of a well-ventilated room.
Here is a new work on the point of commencement,
a new need of public help for those who
are sheltering and tending the fevered poor of
London, and not protecting the poor only, but
all classes of society.

During the last year two hundred and thirty
domestic servants, sixty shopmen and
warehousemen, and three governesses, were received
into the Fever Hospital out of the houses of
their employers. Speedy removal to a place
exactly fitted to their reception was an act of
humanity that served a selfish purpose, by
saving the family of many a wealthy private
person from the danger of infection. A small
admission fee of two guineas — be the case a
long one or a short one — is all that is asked of
non-subscribers when they send to the Fever
Hospital servants or dependents who alarm
their families with fever in the house. As for
the poor, they have learnt to desire nothing
better than admission to this hospital if fever
seizes them. When thoroughly washed, put
into a clean bed in one of its spacious wards,
and sustained by the first taste of more suitable
and nutritious food than they could get at
home, a sigh of relief in those who retain enough
of consciousness to know what is done about
them, has a thousand times accompanied some
such phrase as, " I don't know what would
become of us poor if it were not for such a place
as this!"

Many a widow's mite, many a heart's gratitude,
speaks from the heap of grimy coppers
and small silver coins that is, from time to time,
taken out of the donation boxes placed in the
corridors of the wards. If the rich were as
generous to it as the poor, there would be no
hospital in London so nobly endowed as this,
which has absolutely no endowment whatever.
Yet the admissions to it exceed those into any
other hospital, except Guy's, Saint Bartholomews,
Saint Thomas's, and the London, all of
them endowed magnificently by our forefathers.

IN THE RING.

It was a most difficult position. An invasion
vi et armis, by six charming English girls, upon
the house of an elderly Scotch doctor, of small
practice, slowly diminishing, in an out-of-the-way
uninteresting town, whose few inhabitants
live upon anything and do nothing. Yet, such
was my fortune, I, Adam Black, commonly called
Uncle Adam, probably for the excellent reason
of my being uncle to nobody, and therefore
to everybody, including these charming girls
who had now made a raid upon me. So happy,
laughing, loving, were they; full of admiration