ght there to be operated on and nursed.

The truth is that the hospital is a thoroughly modern one, which has
been built as an extension of buildings that date from the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries. It is managed on soundly scientific
principles, without the least fuss, or any 'board of trustees' or
'committee of management,' or any of that cumbrous administration
which makes so many public hospitals as intricate as labyrinths, only
to be threaded with a clue of red tape, and proportionately
unpractical.

There is a still and sunny garden within, surrounded by a wide and dry
cloister, above which the ancient building rises only one story on the
three sides of the square; but on the fourth side, which looks towards
the sun at noon, there are three stories, which have been built
lately, and the hospital wards are in that wing, one above the other.
On the opposite side, a door opens from the cloister to the choir of
the church, which has also an outer entrance from the street, now
rarely used; for the chaplain comes and goes through the cloister, the
vestibule, and the green door where the portress is.

Beyond her lodge there is a wide hall, with clerestory windows and
glass doors opening to the cloister and the garden; and from this hall
the hospital itself is reached by a passage through which all the
patients are taken. The Mother Superior's rooms are those above the
cloister on the further side of the garden, and have three beautiful
thirteenth century windows divided by pairs of slender columns, so
that each window has two little arches.

In the middle of the garden there is an old well with three arches of
carved stone that spring from three pillars and meet above the centre
of the well-head, and the double iron chain runs over a wheel, and has
two wrought copper buckets, one at each end of it; but the water is
now used only for watering the flowers. There are stone seats round
the well, too, on which three old nuns often sit and sun themselves on
fine days. They are the last of the Sisters of the old time, when
there was no hospital and no training school, and the nuns used to do
anything in the way of nursing that was asked of them by rich or poor,
with a good heart and a laudable intention, but without even the
simplest elements of modern prophylaxis, because it had not been
invented then. For that has all been discovered quite recently, as we
older men can remember only too well.

There are many rose