Now this sort of thing pursues every one through life.  A woman is asked to fetch a large new bound red book, lying on the table by the window, and she fetches five small old boarded brown books lying on the shelf by the fire.  And this, though she has “put that room to rights” every day for a month perhaps, and must have observed the books every day, lying in the same places, for a month, if she had any observation.

Habitual observation is the more necessary, when any sudden call arises.  If “Fanny” had observed “the bottle of salvolatile” in “the aunt’s room,” every day she was there, she would more probably have found it when it was suddenly wanted.

There are two causes for these mistakes of inadvertence. 1.  A want of ready attention; only a part of the request is heard at all. 2.  A want of the habit of observation.

To a nurse I would add, take care that you always put the same things in the same places; you don’t know how suddenly you may be called on some day to find something, and may not be able to remember in your haste where you yourself had put it, if your memory is not in the habit of seeing the thing there always.

[5] [Sidenote:  Approach of death, paleness by no means an invariable effect, as we find in novels.]

It falls to few ever to have had the opportunity of observing the different aspects which the human face puts on at the sudden approach of certain forms of death by violence; and as it is a knowledge of little use, I only mention it here as being the most startling example of what I mean.  In the nervous temperament the face becomes pale (this is the only recognised effect); in the sanguine temperament purple; in the bilious yellow, or every manner of colour in patches.  Now, it is generally supposed that paleness is the one indication of almost any violent change in the human being, whether from terror, disease, or anything else.  There can be no more false observation.  Granted, it is the one recognised livery, as I have said—­de rigueur in novels, but nowhere else.

[6] I have known two cases, the one of a man who intentionally and repeatedly displaced a dislocation, and was kept and petted by all the surgeons; the other of one who was pronounced to have nothing the matter with him, there being no organic change perceptible, but who died within the week.  In both these cases, it was the nurse who, by accurately pointing out what she had accurately observed, to the doctors, saved the one case from persevering in a fraud, the other from being discharged when actually in a dying state.