cted and
wretched children are received, kindly cared for, and educated. In the
opinion of these teachers, mental development is the source of health
to their pupils, and they invariably spoke of the improving health and
vigor of their girls under school training. They come, often, miserable
and sickly from the neglect or abuse of ignorant mothers. Many such were
growing healthy. The inert were growing active and playful, the
deformed, greatly improving. One teacher said that to see the girls
under her care inclined to any active play, until they had been in
school months, sometimes years, was very rare. This inertness was more
difficult to overcome in girls from the higher than the lower classes,
for, in addition to an inert physical organization, a contempt for
labor, with which they associated all exertion whatever, was born with
them; and only through a long course of training--not until their brains
began to take in the meaning and pleasure of study--could they throw it
off; To rouse a girl and find out what she looked forward to in life,
she had often asked her, "And what do you intend to _do_ when you leave
school?" "Oh, sit," had been many times the answer she had received.
"Sit," which meant, she said, to wait and get married.

At Beyrout I visited several very interesting schools. The Superior or
Principal of one told me she had been associated, in her preparatory
course, at Kaiserwerth, with Florence Nightingale, for two years; and
she described to me the discipline of that institution and others, where
these teachers and nurses are trained. It is a discipline of severe
study, accompanied by nursing, watching, hospital practice, and
sometimes the hardest drudgery of work. She had often seen, she said,
"Miss Nightingale, a born lady, on her knees scrubbing floors. But there
was no distinction of persons in these institutions. Those who came to
them looked forward to lives, not of ease, but useful work, and they
must be prepared to bear hardness as good soldiers." "But Miss
Nightingale has broken down; may not the severity of this discipline
have been one cause of what she is suffering now?" She did not think so;
they had all had a training just as severe as hers, the sisters here, in
Jerusalem, Smyrna, and everywhere, and they were well and strong. But
there were limits to human strength and endurance; and Miss
Nightingale's work in the Crimea, performed under such conditions as it
was, had transcended what th