ring the night, and which are therefore comparatively clean from dust
or blacks, the poor "_things_" having "caught" it, they are removed to
other chairs, tables, sofas, upon which you could write your name with
your finger in the dust or blacks. The _other_ side of the "things" is
therefore now evenly dirtied or dusted. The housemaid then flaps every
thing, or some things, not out of her reach, with a thing called a
duster--the dust flies up, then re-settles more equally than it lay
before the operation. The room has now been "put to rights."

[29]

[Sidenote: Atmosphere in painted and papered rooms quite
distinguishable.]

I am sure that a person who has accustomed her senses to compare
atmospheres proper and improper, for the sick and for children, could
tell, blindfold, the difference of the air in old painted and in old
papered rooms, _coeteris paribus_. The latter will always be musty, even
with all the windows open.

[30]

[Sidenote: How to keep your wall clean at the expense of your clothes.]

If you like to wipe your dirty door, or some portion of your dirty wall,
by hanging up your clean gown or shawl against it on a peg, this is one
way certainly, and the most usual way, and generally the only way of
cleaning either door or wall in a bed-room!

[31]

[Sidenote: Absurd statistical comparisons made in common conversation by
the most sensible people for the benefit of the sick.]

There are, of course cases, as in first confinements, when an assurance
from the doctor or experienced nurse to the frightened suffering woman
that there is nothing unusual in her case, that she has nothing to fear
but a few hours' pain, may cheer her most effectually. This is advice of
quite another order. It is the advice of experience to utter
inexperience. But the advice we have been referring to is the advice of
inexperience to bitter experience; and, in general, amounts to nothing
more than this, that _you_ think _I_ shall recover from consumption,
because somebody knows somebody somewhere who has recovered from fever.

I have heard a doctor condemned whose patient did not, alas! recover,
because another doctor's patient of a _different_ sex, of a _different_
age, recovered from a _different_ disease, in a _different_ place. Yes,
this is really true. If people who make these comparisons did but know
(only they do not care to know), the care and preciseness with which
such comparisons require to be made, (and are made),