Walpole House, now the Infirmary, was once the residence of the great Whig Minister, and in his garden George II. and Caroline the Illustrious, when Prince and Princess of Wales, sometimes sat down to dinner, while Chelsea people stared at them through the adjacent railings. A special permission is necessary to view the Infirmary. One other Royal remembrance, and I must close this inadequate account of the Royal Hospital treasures. There is a fine bust of Queen Victoria executed especially for the hall, and paid for by every man in the hospital giving his pay for one day—that day being the great Jubilee of 1887. It shows the great Queen at her noblest and best, as her soldiers love to remember her. East of the hospital lie Ranelagh Gardens, beautiful in their placid old age, and reminiscent in their glades and winding walks of a gay and frivolous past. The huge Rotunda, where nearly three thousand persons could circulate with ease, went out of fashion about 1750. Balloon ascents and fireworks ceased to attract, and in 1804 the big building was pulled down, and the gardens incorporated in the hospital grounds. To-day the pensioners’ little plots of garden, to the north of Ranelagh, are fuller of interest than this flimsy spectre of past gaiety. Some of the old men are ingenious gardeners; each one expresses himself in his allotted space, and builds a rockery, an arbour, or a fountain as his fancy directs, and will gladly sell a nosegay of old-fashioned flowers to a passing stranger. Truly Nell Gwynn and Sir Christopher Wren have given the old soldiers a goodly heritage in the Royal Hospital. NOTES L’ENVOI AND SO WE come to the boundary of Chelsea on the east, for at Sloane Square (and strictly speaking in a corner house, half of which stands in the parish and half outside) the “bounds” used to be “beaten,” and a young boy received a birching which was supposed to write the exact line of parish demarcation on his memory, for transmission to the next generation. I suppose he was adequately rewarded, and I never heard that the assault was made a cause for complaint. Whether a Chelsea boy of to-day would still suffer it, is questionable. Old Chelsea, with its queer ways and its originality in thought and action, is fading day by day. The Bun-house has gone from Union Street, and Box Farm from King’s Road. Who thinks of the “callous murder of an Oriental” when they cut through Turk’s Row? Even the Duke of York’s School, founded in 1801, has carried its little “sons of the brave” off to Dover, where we hope they still say, as they ought, “God bless the Regent and the Duke of York!” but where the object-lesson of the Royal Hospital will not be a part of their education, as it was in Chelsea.