Not more than eighteen years old, she had wandered wearily from some distant place where fatal instalments {267} of the wages of sin had done their work. She had come to London unknown, unnoted, to die. That she had come from afar is but a surmise; she may have been a dweller in this great city, lost amidst the stony desert of its streets, friendless with the friendlessness of the outcast or the wretched, to whom the acquaintances of to-day have little care or opportunity to become the solacers of to-morrow; she may have crept to that dark corner by the churchyard gate, amongst the rack and refuse of the street, as a place in which she, the unconsidered waste and refuse of our boasted civilisation, could most fitly huddle from the cold. She was not left actually to die there, but two days afterwards she passed out of the world where she had been unrecognised. Not without result, however. Among those who had witnessed the distressing occurrence was a surgeon, Mr. William Marsden, who for some time before had repeatedly seen cause to lament, that with all our endowed hospitals, our great medical schools, and the advance of scientific knowledge, the sick poor could only obtain relief by means of letters of recommendation and other delay, until the appointed days for admission. The sight that he had witnessed awoke him to fresh energy. He determined to establish a medical charity, where destitution or great poverty and disease should be the only necessary credentials for obtaining free and immediate relief. His honest benevolent purpose did not cool; in February in the following year (1828), the house in Greville Street was open as a free hospital, and it was taken under the royal patronage of George IV., the Duke of Gloucester becoming its president. King William IV. succeeded George IV. as the patron {268} of this free hospital, and one of the earliest manifestations of the interest of our Queen in public charitable institutions was the expressed desire of her Majesty to maintain the support which it had hitherto received, and to confer upon it the name of the Royal Free Hospital. It need scarcely be said that the late Duke of Sussex took a very strong interest in this charity, and at his death it was determined to erect a new wing, to be called "the Sussex" wing. This work was completed in 1856; and in 1863, by the aid of a zealous and indefatigable chairman of the committee, above £5,000 was raised by special appeal for the purposes of buying the freehold of the entire building, so that it is now, in every sense, a free hospital, with a noble history of suffering relieved, of the sick healed, the deserted reclaimed, the sinful succoured, and those that were ready to perish snatched from the jaws of death.