first morning. She is.now quite well, except for the fracture. It will now be put in splints. The arm was so badly hacked we could not put it in splints, owing to the number of wounds to dress. She was hacked with a short, dirty, grass-cutting knife. When her supposed husband was asked why he did it, he replied he only gave her a few little cuts to frighten her. She was wife No. 2, and very young and pretty. Three of her lovely teeth have gone, too." Such a narrative throws a side-light on the manners and customs which may be met with in the East. The cottage hospitals set down amid beautiful tropical surroundings sound very attractive, but occasionally their furnishing leaves much to be desired, and the nurses have many inconveniences to put up with, besides their difficulties in coping with the native dressers. The private nurses, too, find themselves in strange places-if they are single-handed, one case follows another so quickly that it is hard for them to feel they have done justice to all. One writes of having been called to a serious case of typhoid two hours after her arrival in Ceylon, and others find cases booked for months in advance. Their time is largely occupied by maternity cases and various forms of fever, and they have the satisfaction of knowing that they are able to save many valuable lives. They themselves feel that the strongest plea for their services is the desperate plight in which they often find young men on distant estates, ill to the point of death with enteric fever, isolated from all friends, the doctor only able to visit them once a day, and their native servants ready to be kind, but too ignorant and superstitious to be relied upon for intelligent care. The timely arrival of the nurse from home has, in many instances, averted fatal consequences from the complications which such a state of neglect brings about. The prevailing tone which runs through all the correspondence from which these facts are gleaned is one of cheerful readiness to do their duty, and it is a tribute to the unselfish devotion of English nurses that they know how to make the best of the circumstances in which they find themselves, and are not easily discouraged when their path is beset by unforeseen trials.

But, while the functions of these Colonial and Nursing Committees are the most interesting, equally important are those of the Finance Committee.

Until last year, the funds were entirely derived from the sum originally raised by Mrs. Piggott and a few annual subscriptions.

The necessities of the work require that there should always be a certain floating capital, which can be drawn upon at any moment to meet a sudden demand for outfit, passage-money, etc., which cannot be estimated beforehand, but which often needs a large sum at once. As a general rule, this sum is advanced as a loan, and is refunded as soon as the nurse arrives in the colony; but it may also be that the Association must wait for months before the local committee is in a position to repay its debt. As the list of subscriptions is not long, it was felt it would be a great advantage to have a small endowment fund, from which a regular income would accrue, and thus make the Association less dependent on the fluctuations of popular support. Accordingly, it was decided by the Executive Committee to endeavor to raise a fund of £5,000 for investment. An appeal was made to the public, and although a certain proportion of this modest sum was obtained, donations have recently very largely fallen off in consequence of the numerous demands made upon the public in connection with the war in South Africa. It is much to be hoped that the whole of this amount may before long be in the hands of the Trustees.

In July, 1899, the annual meeting of the Association was held at Stafford House. Lord Loch presided, and the resolution adopting the report was moved by the Secretary of State for the Colonies and seconded by Mr. Asquith, Home Secretary of the late Government. Both expressed their conviction that the field of work was ripe for the harvest, and in his official capacity, Mr. Chamberlain testified to the appreciation which the officials felt for the exertions of the society, and quoted a letter from Colonel Wilcox, in command of the West African frontier force on the Niger, "who had paid a high tribute to the value of the services rendered by the ladies who undertook these labors in connection with the force under his command, and declared his belief that the recovery of some of the young officers from the deadly black water fever was due mainly to the care and the attention of the nurses sent out by the Association."

Since the first appointments were made in 1896, fifty-eight nurses have been sent out by the Colonial Nursing Association, of whom twenty have been private nurses and thirty-eight hospital nurses. The former are employed in Ceylon, Cyprus, Dominica, East Griqualand, Japan, Mauritius, Perak, Selangor, Singapore, and also at Bangkok, where there is a nursing home for which

the Queen of Siam, who is much interested in it, has given a house, on the understanding that they shall train several Siamese women every year. The latter are in Accra, the Bahamas, Cape Coast Castle, Ceylon, Cyprus, Hong-Kong, Lagos, Northern Nigeria, Old Calabar, Perak, Selangor, Sierra Leone, Singapore and Trinidad. In Accra, Bangkok, Hong-Kong, Lagos, Old Calabar and Sierra Leone there is a provision which permits the nurses to go out to take care of private cases, when occasion arises. This touches a point which the committee keeps before it as an ideal— viz. that in the future every hospital or nursing home which receives support from Government funds should have rooms attached to it which can be the headquarters of nurses whose first duty will be to devote themselves to private cases, and whose time, when not employed in this way, can be given to work in the hospital. This would greatly simplify the question of proper lodgings for the private nurses when they are disengaged-a problem which in some remote places it is not easy to solve.

Simultaneously with the work of this Association special efforts have been made, both by private individuals and Her Majesty's Government, to establish schools of tropical medicine, and to promote investigations into the causes of tropical diseases. A school has been started at the Dreadnought Hospital at the Royal Victoria and Albert Docks at Greenwich, assisted by a grant from the Imperial Government, and there is also one at the Royal Southern Hospital at Liverpool. Both places afford unusual facilities for the practical study and treatment of these disorders, as ships constantly return to the docks with severe cases on board which are at once removed to the hospitals.

The Colonial Nursing Association has arranged with these hospitals to take a certain number of their nurses for a short course of special instruction. Already a preference is given by the Association to those who have undergone this supplementary training, and, in the near future, it is probable that no nurse will be sent to the more dangerous climates who has not had the advantages of this experience.

The work which has been described in the preceding pages may appear to be unimportant in comparison with much that is done in the large charitable institutions which abound in the great cities of England and America; but, nevertheless, it is not one of the least of the obligations of empire.

The control of the tropics devolves more and more on the 'Anglo-Saxon race, and it carries with it the responsibility for the civilization and welfare of the vast populations which turn to English-speaking people for protection and good government.

This duty can only be satisfactorily discharged by men of character and ability, who will bring to their work the best qualities of their race.

The lives of such men are precious, and any organization which will help to preserve them will tend to make the task of administration in tropical countries more easy, and to lighten the burden which empire must bring.

MARY ENDICOTT CHAMBERLAIN.

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF ENGLISH FICTION.

BY GEORGE Moore.

I.

It is always difficult to realize that circumstance is unstable and fleeting and that a dream outlasts an empire. Two years ago an Englishman died amid such vociferous testimony of his greatness that he seemed certain of eternal remembrance. But in spite of our resolution to remember, a veil of dust already divides us from him; his name, though vivid in the stone, is vague in the heart, for the heart only remembers ideas and dreams. A few years before, an Irishman died, abandoned by his country amid all circumstance of political disaster. But circumstance is unsubstantial and transitory and the light that he carried on earth seems merely to have been lifted into the sky. One man sprang from an ancient civilization whose life has passed out of dream into circumstance and facts, the other from a race still subject to dreams.

In Elizabethan times England was young, blithe, careless, interested in ideas rather than in facts, and neither in social customs nor in adventures in the South Seas did our early poets find subjects for their poems; the human heart was their adventure, and the Elizabethans span their poems out of the passions. A nation in its youth may be compared with a fountain which, bursting through the loose earth, scatters all the summer a refreshing brightness amid embowering trees. The birds come down from the branches and drink, with sweet movement of head and throat, and flowers brighten beneath the refreshing shower. The sun's heat cakes the earth, but still the water flows, loosening it, and the grass and flowers renew themselves until the first frost marks a deadly change in the season. But even at the end of September,