greatest relief expressed by a patient, who seemed too ill to notice any such change, at the substitution of one single, simple classical vase for a whole shelf-full of tawdry French china ornaments, and I date the recovery of another from the moment of the removal out of his sight of an exceedingly smart modern dressing-table, with many bows of ribbon and flounces of lace and muslin. I do not mean to say that the furniture of a sick-room need be ugly—only that it should be simple and not too much of it. Nothing confuses and worries a person who is ill like seeing his attendants threading their way through mazes of chairs and sofas and tables; but he will gladly look and find relief and even a weary kind of pleasure in gazing at a table of a beautiful, simple form, placed where it is no fatigue for him to look at it, with a glass of flowers, a terra-cotta vase, a casket, anything which is so intrinsically beautiful in form as to afford repose to the eye.
I have often observed that when people begin to take pleasure in colour, it is a sure sign of convalescence—for in severe illness, unless indeed it be of such a nature as to preclude all power of observation, form is of more importance to the patient than colour. One learns a great deal from what people tell one after they are well enough to talk of such things as past, distem-
