remaining to care him herself. She complained to the professor who had operated, in presence of the house doctor, and said she was compelled to stay herself with her husband as the nurse's services were nominal. He pretended, however, not to understand, and bowed himself out of the room with an embarrassed air. All the operating professors in Vienna are aware of the disgraceful state of things in the Sanatorium, yet they wink at it, and continue to send their patients there. No one seems to have the pluck to speak out, and the doctor who did so would place himself in a very invidious position. In the particular case mentioned above, the patient, as he gained strength, was moved daily into the garden, avowedly for the purpose of allowing his room to be properly cleaned and aired. He lost a small cap, and the nurse was asked to look for it. This she professed to do, but regretted being unable to find it. A fortnight later, when the patient was leaving, the cap was discovered lying under the bed, where it had been all the time.

This fashionable Sanatorium stands not very far from the Allgemeines Krankenhaus. Though it possesses a gorgeous liveried porter, and fine reception rooms, covered with Persian carpets and decorated with exotics, it swarms with fleas. The distinguished persons who visit it and commend its elegance have never resided within its walls. Breakfast is not allowed to be served before eight, nor even then is it always punctual. A feverish patient awaking at six is thus compelled to wait two hours for a cup of tea to quench his thirst. In winter, no fire is allowed to be lighted before half-past seven and the rooms get deadly cold. After 9.30 P.M. patients are expected to be quiet and to give no further trouble.

Each

To sixty patients in the place there were eleven nurses. nurse had consequently five or six patients, all serious cases, requiring constant care after grave operations. These nurses never had any fixed holiday, and were never relieved from their duty, but were in service night and day, week after week, and month after month. They told the wife of the patient above referred to that they were at most allowed to go out for an hour twice or thrice a week. Their pay is 15 gulden a month, and they remain solely because of the tips they receive. So over tired and harassed are they that they have neither time, patience, nor strength to fulfil their duties properly.

If any medical association in Vienna would cast aside traditions and send over eight or ten competent and educated young women of the governess class to train in a first-class London hospital, and then allow them, on the completion of their course, to re-organise nursing in the Austrian capital, it would be doing a good work for humanity.. The Emperor, who is so interested in all that concerns the welfare

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of his people, would probably approve if the project were set before him, and might be prepared to assist with funds.

For the fact that matters, bad as they undoubtedly are under present conditions, are not worse, the kind-heartedness of individuals is to be thanked, not the system. As things stand, the patients are at the mercy of a brutal man or a dishonest woman.

C. O'CONOR-ECCLES.

1899

NORTH CLARE-LEAVES FROM A DIARY

Ballynalachen, The Burren: Saturday, June 17th, 1899. THAT odd burst of almost tropical heat with which this month swept into existence has now wholly passed away, and seems to have left little traces of its passage, at all events in this grey and rock-infested region. Looking round, from under the shelter of the particular boulder I have selected, nowhere far or near can I discern a symptom of exhaustion, hardly even the note of full maturity. Young half-furled fronds, young plants of all sorts, are pricking their leaves out of their stony prisons. The very water, lying in pools over the hollows of the surface, or trickling along well-worn gullies, seems clearer, fresher, more virginal than elsewhere. The sky, cumbered though it is with clouds, seems to open up larger vistas, and to retain even at midday some of those opaline tints which belong elsewhere only to the dawn. The Atlantic plain rolls its uncountable waves towards me, each wave seeming to glimmer with a promise; promises never fulfilled, never likely now to be fulfilled, yet remaining pleasant promises to the end of time. A capricious spring, a momentary summer, a long grey, not unenjoyable autumn-that seems to be the note and prognostication of the region.

It must be nearly a score of years since I stepped one day rather suddenly into intimacy with the Burren. I had known it off and on before that, but only in a casual and half-hearted fashion. The extent of one's intimacy with a region depends upon a variety of things, some of them rather difficult ones to define. It takes time, of course, but it takes a good deal more than time. It takes days of desultory, above all of solitary rambles; days of still more desultory thought, or what we are pleased to call thought; days of standing about, and of doing nothing at all, till suddenly, often unexpectedly, one finds that the friendly, if impalpable genius of a locality has come to take up his post beside one. Then, and not till then, one can call oneself at home; then, and not till then, one knows where one is, and what distinguishes the particular spot in question from every other spot upon this habitable globe. Until that moment we may be nominally well acquainted with a region-nay, may have spent 603

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years in it, yet in reality know it as little as if our feet had never trodden it at all.

Coming back after a lapse of years is a test not so much of a place as of oneself. Will the old impressions reassert themselves, one wonders, or will they be spoilt, twisted, overriden by later ones? Unless by some exceptional ill luck, the larger features of a region are not often seriously changed; and as such ill luck generally takes the form of what is called 'improvement,' it is one of the few forms of it which Ireland has hitherto as a rule been spared. Certainly the Burren has not changed, and if change there be, the change is in my own eyes, which are not as good as I could wish. Am I disappointed? I ask myself, and on the whole I feel that I can frankly answer 'No.' Beautiful, save at a few spots, I do not remember that I ever called the Burren, even in my most dithyrambic moments; but what I did feel inclined to call it, that it seems to me to deserve now, and to the full as much as ever it did.

One point I cannot believe in any one being disappointed in here, and that is the extraordinary luminousness, the well-nigh magical power of reflection, which distinguishes this odd region from every other I have ever walked over. Elsewhere the sky has to wait for some river, some lake, at all events for some pool or puddle before it is able to give us a picture of itself. Here the ground itself becomes a mirror. These big stone tables are rarely, even at their driest, without some corner upon which to catch the sky. Their horizontality helps them, keeping them wet where more sloping ground had long since dried up. Walking about over them, one is continually conscious of that odd inversion of light and shade which elsewhere is only to be seen when the snow has played topsy-turvy with the usual relativity of land and sky. One's perceptions seem to be at fault. The earth shares the tones of the sky, so that the sky itself seems changed. A corner is turned; there is no water strictly speaking in sight, yet so perfect are the reflections that one can watch the procession of the piled-up clouds passing along in a steady sequence, and that without lifting one's glance from the flagging at one's feet.

In this wild, wet, all-pervading stoniness there is something that appeals quite curiously to the mind. One seems to be walking about in some interspace between land and water, which does not strictly belong either to the one or to the other. The thin films of water slip along under one's feet, as if under a keel, and one meets one's own face unexpectedly reflected in the rocks over which one steps. Like those the sky overhead is broken into innumerable rifts, opening up between innumerable clouds. That hollow thud, thud,' which never entirely ceases, comes to one over the nearest verge, and the whole scene is full of a sort of wild and desolate peace, very individual; made up of moving water, April lights, and wild grey surfaces; cold, gleaming, transparent.

Ballyvaughan: Monday, June 19th.

I am rather late this year for the great pride of the Burren, its famous red Burnet moth, Zygana nubigena. It is not quite over, for a good many are still to be seen, sitting upon the culms of the grasses, and making believe to be flowers, but they are mere waifs and strays of what they must have been a fortnight earlier. At their best they are really a wonderful little sight, and for other than entomological eyes. Now, like some erratic swarm of red bees, rising higher, higher; not very high, for your burnet is a poor flier, but steadily upward, in a droning bumble-like flight; up and up until their fiery red dots can tell successfully against the grey satin surface below. Now reflected in one of the countless pools; suddenly, perhaps, disappearing altogether, as rain threatens, or settling by thousands upon every dry twig and green stalk within reach.

England has its burnets; even Scotland has one or two, but neither England nor Scotland can lay claim to possess our own Nubigena. Even in Ireland it is the most exclusive of exclusives, 'keeps itself to itself' in the most rigid and superior fashion, and has never I believe been met with further east than a dozen miles or so from home, though why it stays there, or how it got there in the first instance, no one, so far as I am aware, has ever hazarded a suggestion. For my part I can never see its pretty, semi-transparent red coat without having brought back to my mind that memorable day -the only memorable day, I am disposed to think, of my own idle, moth-hunting youth-that on which I received a letter from a great, nay, greatest, zoologist; greatest of our age one may surely say, without fear of contradiction, of any and of every age.

Ye Gods! under what a dazzling illumination that day still floats, and yet how many long grey years have rolled over it! Like every one who has ever spent any time in the Burren, I had noticed that there were hardly any honey-bees there. Whether they all get blown overboard, or whether they lose their way among its abounding crags, certain it is that, save in a few favoured spots, few or none are to be found. Now, as a good many flowering plants are absolutely dependent upon bees for their fertilisation, and as such plants abound in the Burren, the problem how they manage to get on without them is evidently rather a nice one. With all the lighthearted certainty of youth and ignorance I set myself to solve it, and the solution I came to was that our private and particular burnet moth to a great degree supplied the vacant place. As regards orchids there really would be little question about the matter, since one had only to catch a moth in order to find their pollinia tightly glued to its rolled-up tongue, doubtless to its extreme inconvenience. As regards other plants the case was more obscure, the honey-bee's great pollen receptacle, its leg-basket, being wanting of course to all