The English nurse is a being apart, with a profound sense of fitness in all things, herself the slave of duty; and having certain ideals transmitted, who can tell how, by an unwritten traditional code, as to what _ought to be_, and a gift of authority by which she secures that these things _shall be_, reverence for God, reverence in prayer, reverence for parents, consideration of brothers for sisters, unselfishness, manners, etc., her views on all these things are like the laws of the Medes and Persians "which do not alter "-- and they are also holy and wholesome.

The Irish nurse rules by the heart, and by sympathy, by a power of self-devotion that can only be found where the love of God is the deepest love of the heart; she has no views, but--she knows.

She does not need to observe--she sees' she has instincts, she never lays down a law, but she wins by tact and affection, lifting up the mind to God and subduing the will to obedience, while appearing to do nothing but love and wait.

The stamp that she leaves on the earliest years of training is never entirely effaced; it remains as some instinct of faith, a habit of resignation to the will of God, and habitual recourse to prayer.

Both these types of educators rule by their gift from God, and it is hard to believe that the most finished training in the art of nursery management can produce anything like them, for they govern by those things that lectures and handbooks cannot teach--faith, love, and common sense.
Those who take up the training of the next stage have usually to learn by their own experience, and study what is given to very few as a natural endowment--the art of so managing the wills of children that without provoking resistance, yet without yielding to every fancy, they may be led by degrees to self-control and to become a law to themselves.