HOWEVER skilfully designed the arrangements of a house may appear to be, however sumptuously decorated and furnished its rooms, it is impossible to know whether a great law of common sense and practical usefulness has guided such arrangements, until there has been an illness in the house. Then will it be discovered - too late alas! - whether doors and windows open conveniently, whether fireplaces give out proper warmth, how the apparatus for ventilation works, and whether the staircases, landings, cupboards, and a thousand unconsidered items of the architect's labours have been planned in the best possible way, or in the stupidest. For the comfort and convenience of the patient at such times, it is by no means necessary that much money should have been spent on the construction of the house that chances to shelter him in his hour of suffering, nor that its furnitures or decorations should be of a costly-character. Fortunately such things need not aim at anything higher than cleanliness and convenience, and we only require to exert our own recollections in support of this assertion.

As far as my individual experience goes, I have seen an old woman, who had been bed-ridden for years, more comfortably housed and tended beneath a cottage roof, and her room kept more exquisitely clean and sweet than that of many wealthy-patients in splendid houses. Of course everything depends on the capacity for organisation and arrangement in the person who has charge of the invalid, but the nurse's task may be made much easier by having to perform it in a bedroom and under conditions which are in accordance with the exigencies of such a time.

Many smart and pretty-looking bedrooms are discovered by their sick owner to be very different abodes to what they seemed to him in health. Awkwardly-placed doors and windows produce unsuspected draughts; the too close proximity of an ill-arranged staircase or housemaid's closet becomes a serious trouble, and a low pitched ceiling prevents proper ventilation. It is more difficult than one imagines to find in a badly proportioned room a single convenient place for the patient's bed. It must be either close to the door, or touching the fireplace, or under a window or in some situation where it distinctly ought not to be. I have known such faults - faults which occasioned discomfort every moment, and had to be remedied by a thousand make-shift contrivances, occur in splendid rooms in magnificent houses; and I have known poor little modern dwellings in a colony to be perfectly free from them. When I am told, "such or such a room or house is a very comfortable one to be ill in," then I know that the construction and arrangement of that abode, however simple it may appear, must needs be up to a very high mark indeed.

Of course a great deal can be done to modify existing evils, by a judicious arrangement of screens and curtains, by taking out useless furniture, by substituting a com-fortable low bed, easy to get at, for a cumbrous couch where the unhappy patient's nose seems as if it was intended to rub against the ceiling, and various other improvements. But what can remedy a smoky chimney, or a grate where all the heat goes up the chimney, or windows that rattle, and doors that open in every direction except the right one? How can an outside landing or lobby be created at a moment's notice, or a staircase moved a yard further off? Of course if an illness gave notice before it seized its victim, if people ever realised that a house should be so constructed as to reduce the chances of illness to a minimum, and raise its possible comforts to a maximum if it did come, then everything would go on quite smoothly and we should certainly live, and probably die, happy. But this is exactly what we do not do, and this chapter would never have been written if I had not seen with my own eyes innumerable instances where neither want of money, nor space, nor opportunity for improvement were the causes of a wretchedly uncomfortable sick-room.

I have known bedrooms which looked nests of rosy, luxurious comfort until their owner fell ill, and then turned suddenly, as it seemed, into miserable comfortless abodes of frippery and useless, tasteless finery - where a candle could scarcely be placed anywhere without risk of fire, and where the patient has deeply complained of the way the decorations of the room "worried" her. As a rule, in a severe illness, sick people detest anything like a confusion or profusion of ornaments or furniture. If I am in authority in such a case, I turn all gimcracks bodily out, substituting the plainest articles of furniture to be found in the house. Very few ornaments are allowable in a sick-room, and I only encourage those which are of a simple, correct form. I have known the 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, distempered fancies. For instance, I was once nursing a typhoid fever patient, who lay for some days in an agony of weakness. He had been deaf as well as speechless, and all his senses appeared to have faded away to the very brink of extinction. Yet afterwards when he became able to talk of his sensations at different stages of his illness, he mentioned that particular time, and I found he had been keenly conscious of the forms of the objects around. He spoke of the pleasure which the folds of a curtain had afforded him, of the "comfort" of the shape of the old-fashioned arm-chair in which I used to sit, and of how grateful he had felt when he observed that divers gimcracks had been removed from his sight.