Not many of the houses looked prosperous and most of them were grimy; yet the street had charm, for traces of another era lingered in the crookedness of windows and doors, in the casual little yards, in old-fashioned wooden porches elaborate with scrollwork. New York roared around the street and above it. An icy wind from the harbor swept through it, blowing paper into the faces of pedestrians, and tearing at the “For Rent” sign swinging over the door of the smallest house on the street — a tiny red brick house with green shutters and a white door.

The sign creaked dismally, and the janitor, coming out of the basement of the adjoining house, looked up with an expression of melancholy indifference. Then he glanced along the street and brightened. He could always tell when people were apartment hunting, because they progressed so jerkily, pausing every few steps to appraise house fronts and read signs.

The two girls coming toward him were proceeding after this method, and their faces had the set look of people whose feet are beginning to hurt. They were pretty girls, and smartly dressed, but they were not New Yorkers if the janitor was any judge. New Yorkers always gazed upward, admiring New York, while strangers never did so — for fear of seeming unsophisticated. The Empire State Building was in plain sight, its slender shaft glittering in the sun, yet neither girl gave it a good look, a long, pleased, neck-stretching look, as any New Yorker would have done.

Autumn comes early in New Hampshire. September had scarcely begun, yet already the northern flanks of the White Mountains were touched with crimson, and the worn summits stood out sharply in frosty air. In the valleys, however, the summer still clung in a drowsy blue haze, and the maples shading the little town of Springdale had not yet lost their August green.

Springdale itself lay along the banks of its small river, a scattering of white houses and spacious barns walled in by hills — a sleepy little town in a sleepy little valley, where nothing, it seemed, ever happened.

But something was happening that September afternoon, though not precisely in the village: On a bluff high above it, in the grounds of a small, glaringly new brick hospital, there was a continuous stir of activity. Cars sped around the circular drive, each pausing before the hospital to unload a trunk and passengers — always a hesitant girl with a suitcase, accompanied by relatives. Each time, the group went uncertainly into the hospital to emerge, presently, through the rear door, in the wake of a white-uniformed nurse.

A lank man in overalls, with handlebar moustache, dawdled a lawnmower over the grass as close as possible to the hospital entrance.

“No good’ll come of it!” he muttered darkly from time to time for the benefit of the “up” patients congregated in the sun porches. The patients grinned. They were all natives of the village or surrounding countryside and Nat Delano’s dire predictions were a long-standing community joke.

The hospital janitor and three maids were grouped, ostensibly for conversation, in a basement doorway overlooking the drive. Back among the trees, on the verandah of Edgett Hall, the nurses’ residence, was a gathering of white uniforms whose owners had been seized with a desire for fresh air — and a view of the centre rear door of the hospital.

This was the door through which the new arrivals emerged, an intermittent procession of tall girls and short, thin girls and fat, with assorted parents. But however varied their looks the girls had three things in common: they were all young, all a little scared, and they must all pass that battery of eyes from the hospital to the brick dormitory among the trees.

She began a new life in a big hospital.

Sue looked for a place to escape from the terrible Mrs. Pasquale. There it was — a small door — probably a broom closet. Sue jerked open the door. She stepped in and — dropped!

Down and down she fell. Then she struck bottom — soft, yielding bottom. She had fallen down the laundry chute.

Adventures — comic, exciting, dangerous — mark Sue Barton’s first year as Student Nurse.

That Friday seemed like every other July day and not at all like an end to anything. Great puffs of white cloud drifted innocently across the hazy summit of Mt. Washington, the afternoon was drowsy with the song of insects and the smell of pines. A breeze, fresh and clean from the wooded slopes of New Hampshire’s Presidential Range, brought a pleasant touch of coolness. It was a day to enjoy and there was no hint of trouble in it.

Sue paused halfway up the back-porch steps and turned, a slender figure in white slacks and green blouse. Her copper-red hair was brushed softly back from a vivid face which refused to tan regardless of sun and wind, and her brown eyes were quiet with contentment. She smiled, half in tenderness, half in amusement, as she looked back.

Her five-year-old twins, Johnny and Jerry, with Maxl the dachshund, were entangled in a wriggling heap on the lawn. Her daughter Tabitha, aged seven, was swinging under the big maple, dark pigtails flying as she swooped. From the tool shed came a bass rumble slightly off key — the voice of Sue’s husband, Dr. William Barry, humming Old Man River while he collected his fishing kit. Indoors and somewhat muffled by distance Sue heard a gurgle followed by a prolonged squeak and she laughed. The baby was awake.

The late afternoon sunlight spilled down through the maples, touching into brilliance the red heads of the tumbling little boys, and dappling Tabitha’s happy face.

At twenty-three, Sue Barton was a high-spirited and courageous young nurse with a temper that matched her red hair. She had graduated from a great metropolitan hospital, served with distinction in the Henry Street Settlement in New York, and incidentally she had fallen in love with Dr. Bill Barry, whom she had first known as an interne [sic].

Sue loved her work in the wards, the discipline and efficiency of the operating room and the friendships she had won among her patients. When Dr. Bill first proposed, Sue felt that she could not give up her professional life. But Bill was persistent and at last she decided to marry him and to help him with his country practice.

But the marriage has to be postponed, Bill becomes an object of hostility, a typhoid epidemic which he cannot control threatens his reputation, and Sue suddenly finds herself fighting tooth and nail with all the courage and training at her command to save the man she loves. Here is a story of the nursing career, with the excitement, the laughter, and the authenticity which have distinguished the earlier Sue Barton books.