Note 26b — L’ENVOY.

Independent of advantages afforded within the present Hospital, application for orders to obtain “out of door” advice and medicine have been very numerous; and they have not unfrequently been made by persons far superior to those who are supposed (but most erroneously) to be the only recipients of charitable aid. I entreat the reader’s indulgence while I briefly relate one circumstance within my own knowledge. A few months ago, a lady (for poverty is no destroyer of birth-rights) requested from me a ticket for an out-door patient; and, in answer to my inquiries, at length, with trembling lips and streaming eyes, confessed it was for her husband she needed it. She had made what is called a love-match; her family refused to do anything to alleviate the poverty which followed his misfortunes, unless she forsook her husband; her knowledge of the most sacred duty of woman’s life, and, indeed, I believe, poor thing, her enduring love, prevented her having the great sin to answer for, of abandoning him in his distress; and her skill in drawing and embroidery enabled her to support her sick husband and herself. “I can do that,” she said, “and procure him even little luxuries, if I have not a doctor’s bill to pay; but the medicines are so expensive, that he will be comfortless unless we can receive aid from this Institution; I have paid, during the last two weeks, twelve shillings for medicine.” His case was utterly and entirely without hope, but, as she told me afterwards, no words could express the alleviation to his sufferings, mental and physical, which followed the assistance he obtained at the Hospital.