e human organization could endure--cold,
hunger, foul air, insufficient and unwholesome food, with such incessant
work, watching, and nursing, that no human being was proof against it.
It was a miracle what Miss Nightingale had withstood before she broke
down.

But these sisters wear no long or heavy dresses. Their uniform is a
simple dark-blue-and-white calico dress-skirt neither long nor very
full, sleeves close, yet allowing perfect freedom in the use of the arm,
a simple white collar and apron, and cap of shining, spotless whiteness.
Their shoes, too, are after the pattern of those which, we are told, are
always worn by Florence Nightingale--with a sole as broad as the foot
they were made for, and fitted to the natural shape of the foot. The
food, the sister said, at Kaiserwerth, as in all the training-schools,
was "nourishing, but very simple." Such facts are worth noting. If they
were accompaniments of our system of education, I do not believe that
American girls would break down under the brain-work that any University
course for men, in our country, imposes. As to the item of shoes, who
does not know that a great deal more work, and better, can be performed
in shoes that fit, than in such as tire the feet? And this is scarcely
less true of brain-work than house-work. I believe that the shoes worn
by young girls and young women now, are a great cause of nervous
irritability, and, joined with other causes, may be a source of disease,
"nervous prostration," so called in after life. I have heard women say
many times, "Nothing in the world will bring a sick-headache on so
quickly as wearing a shoe that hurts my feet." The oft repeated words
have led me to watch my pupils in this respect carefully, and to study
shoes and their effects, as among the evils which certainly ought not to
be charged to brain-work, _per se_, nor to our school system, in
general. It also made me take especial note of the shoes that the
Deaconess sisters wore as a part of the dress in which, through long
practice, they learned "hardness," and came out strong and healthy, but
not the less accomplished, charming women.

The school at Beyrout, under charge of these sisters, is probably one of
the best in all the East. I was conducted by the lady Principal through
every department. In one room an Arabic Professor was engaged at the
black-board, instructing a class in studies pursued in that language. In
another part of the same room, young ladies