But it is equally true that minor symptoms which in adults are universally recognised to be dependent upon cerebral unrest or fatigue are of everyday occurrence in childhood.  Broken and disturbed sleep, absence of appetite and persistent refusal of food, gastric pain and discomfort after meals, nervous vomiting, morbid flushing and blushing, headache, irritability and excessive emotional display, at whatever age they occur, are indications of a mind that is not at rest.  In children, as in adults, they may be prominent although the physical surroundings of the patient may be all that could be desired and all that wealth can procure.  It is an everyday experience that business worries and responsibilities in men, domestic anxieties or childlessness in women, have the power to ruin health, even in those who habitually or grossly break none of its laws.  The unstable mind of the child is so sensitive that cerebral fatigue and irritability are produced by causes which seem to us extraordinarily trivial.  In the little life which the child leads, a life in which the whole seems to us to be comprised in dressing and undressing, washing, walking, eating, sleeping, and playing, it is not easy to detect where the elements of nervous overstrain lie.  Nor is it as a rule in these things that the mischief is to be found.  It is in the personality of mother or nurse, in her conduct to the child, in her actions and words, in the tone of her voice when she addresses him, even in the thoughts which pass through her mind and which show themselves plainly to that marvellously acute intuition of his, which divines what she has not spoken, that we must seek for the disturbing element.  The mental environment of the child is created by the mother or the nurse.  That is her responsibility and her opportunity.  The conduct of the child must be the criterion of her success.  If things go wrong, if there is constant crying or ungovernable temper, if sleep and food are persistently refused, or if there is undue timidity and tearfulness, there is danger that seeds may be sown from which nervous disorders will spring in the future.

There are many women who, without any deep thought on the matter, have the inborn knack of managing children, who seem to understand them, and have a feeling for them.  With them, we say, the children are always good, and they are good because the element of nervous overstrain has not arisen.  There are other women, often very fond of children, who are conspicuously lacking in this power.  Contact with one of these well-meaning persons, even for a few days, will demoralise a whole nursery.  Tempers grow wild and unruly, sleep disappears, fretfulness and irritability take its place.  Yet of most mothers it is probably true that they are neither strikingly proficient nor utterly deficient in the power of managing children.  If they lack the gift that comes naturally to some women, they learn from experience and grow instinctively to feel when they have made a false step with the