one, two, and three beds. All are perfectly heated, lighted, and
ventilated. The medical inspector visits the house every month, and
gives it due praise for meeting every condition of modern medical
science.

A committee of ladies takes the hospital as an especial object of its
care. They have organized a system of patronage, by which beds are
furnished poor patients at a low rate, in some cases gratuitously.
Fifteen subscribers give each two francs, or forty cents, a month; the
sick man or his patron pays a franc a day, to which the Deaconess Home
adds also a franc daily. These three francs represent the bare expenses
of a hospital bed. Of course, sixty cents a day is far from meeting the
entire cost of rent, food, baths, medicine, and service; but those
patients who have been accustomed to a certain degree of comfort in
life, when paying three francs, are freed from the painful impression of
receiving charity.

Many of the patients, when sent forth from the hospital, are directed to
the Convalescents' Home, at Passy. This is an inestimable benefit; what
could this poor servant do, whose strength is not yet sufficient to
undertake fatiguing labor? Or this mother of a family, who would
certainly fall ill again if obliged to resume the heavy burden of
housekeeping, accompanied by privations and wearing economies, were it
not for the home at Passy? Such homes of rest and convalescence are a
necessity in connection with every well-equipped deaconess institution.
The pharmacy is in the charge of a deaconess trained especially for her
duties. A deaconess director, several nurse deaconesses and
probationers, with one or two aged women, constitute the working force
of the hospital outside of the physicians. So many denominational
hospitals are now arising in America that the arrangement of hospitals
under the care of deaconesses in Germany, France, and England, cannot
fail to have interest for us.

There are no nurses like the deaconesses. Other nurses, however well
prepared in the best of training-schools, do not have the same high
motive that lifts the service onto the plane of religious duty, where
the question of self-interest is wholly lost sight of. It was the
perception of this truth that led the authorities of the German Hospital
in Philadelphia to send to Germany for deaconesses as nurses, and that
has brought about the erection of the magnificent Mary J. Drexel Home
for Deaconesses.

But let us return to Paris a