“Ow”--like the boy scout, he has a theatrically cockney accent--“I am glad to know what to do for discollation. I’d never studied that, loike, before.”
While the doctor leant back and rested, the hospital nurse examined each student privately on the subject of the previous instructions. The Signorina happened to be quite close to a little old lady with bonnet and strings, and a small, eager, withered, agitated face under bands of frizzled grey hair--the kind of little old lady who is always ready to respond to the call of duty, and who is in the van of knitters for “our dear, brave soldiers” or “our gallant tars.”
“What,” said the hospital nurse tenderly, “would you do for a bed-sore?”
The little old lady began to twitter and flutter:
“I would first wash the place with warm water, and--oh, dear me, dear me, I _did_ know, I knew quite well a minute ago--with, with something to disinfect.”
“It is something to disinfect, quite right,” approved the nurse.
“A salt, I think--I’m sure it was. I could get it at the chemist----”
“Certainly,” said the nurse, as if she were speaking to a child of two years old, “the chemist would be sure to keep it. It’s quite a simple thing. But you would have to know what to ask for, wouldn’t you?”
“Oh, dear me, yes. P--p-- or did it begin with an I?”
“Perchloride of mercury,” said the nurse, smothering a yawn.
“Oh yes,” cried the little old lady, delighted, “that’s it.”
“Well, now you know it, don’t you,” said the nurse brightly, wrote “Passed” in her notebook, and turned to the next.
“How much liquid nourishment would you give a typhoid patient at a time?”
This to a village girl, who looked blank, not to say terrified, and wrung her hands in her lap.
“I mean,” helped the questioner, “if the patient were put on milk--a milk diet, very usual in typhoid cases--how much milk would you give at a time?”
“Two quarts, miss,” she said with alacrity.
“Not at a time, I think,” corrected the examiner, quite unruffled. “Two quarts, perhaps, in the twenty-four hours, if you could get the patient to take it--that would be splendid. Typhoid is a very weakening malady. It’s a good thing to keep the strength up--if you _can_, you know.”
The Signorina heard this optimist make her report a little later to the charming daughter of the charming family, who had herself studied to good purpose, but was too modest to undertake the instructions.