These rooms, where patients assemble, and doctors consult, are on the right of the pleasant quadrangle, with its large centre oval garden plot, containing a double ring of trees; and here also is the reception room for "accidents" and urgent cases—a very suggestive room, with styptics, immediate remedies, and prompt appliances ready to hand, but like all the rest of the official portion of the building, very plain and practical, with evidence of there being little time to regard mere ease or ornament, and of a disregard of anything which is not associated with the work that has to be done. It is the same with other apartments, where it is obvious that no unnecessary expenditure is incurred for mere official show. The business of the place is to heal by means of food, of rest, and of medicine, and there, on the left of the quadrangle, a flight of steps leads downwards to a wide area, where, in the kitchens, the domestic servants are busy clearing up, after serving the eighty-eight rations which have been issued for dinner—rations of fish, flesh, and fowl, or those "special diets" which are taken under medical direction. There is something about this kitchen, the store-rooms, and offices, with the steps leading thereto, and the cat sitting blinking in the sun, which irresistibly reminds me of the heights of Dover and some portion of the barrack building there; the old military look of the place clings to this Gray's Inn Road establishment still, and the visitor misses the wonderful appliances and mechanical adaptations of some more modern institutions, not even lifts to convey the dinners to the wards being possible in such an edifice. {271} There is some compensating comfort in noting, however, that the nursing staff is so organised as to secure personal attention to the patients, and that the arrangements are touchingly homely, not only in regard to the simple furniture, the few pictures and engravings, and the little collection of books that are to be found in the wards, but also in the matter of sympathetic, motherly, and sisterly help, which is less ceremonious, but not less truly loving, than is to be found in some places of higher pretensions.