Soon after the new patient’s arrival he is visited by the house-physician, who prescribes for him a treatment which the physician-in-chief will confirm or rectify on his daily round next morning. At five a.m. the ward-servants come on duty, and then a clatter begins, the brush and the broom being freely plied. “So much the worse,” says Dr. Le Fort, a severe critic of the Paris hospital system, “for the patient who, having passed a sleepless night, is beginning to get a little repose.” In English hospitals, however, the same turmoil reigns at the same hour, and the sufferer from insomnia is as badly off as his Parisian fellow. From eight to nine a.m. the physician goes his round of visits, accompanied by his assistants. He passes from bed to bed, feels pulses, looks at tongues, prescribes medicines, and so forth. At ten o’clock the breakfast-hour is sounded. Large cans, containing soup and vegetables, are brought into the ward. The ward-servants, or _infirmiers_ present to the sister a succession of tin basins, into which she serves out the precise quantity of food ordered for the patients by the doctor. The quality of the food leaves nothing to be desired. The meat supplied is the best procurable, the fish is fresh, the vegetables irreproachable; but the cooking is the reverse of satisfactory. A mutton cutlet, cooked half an hour before dinner, and put in the oven to keep hot, comes sometimes to the patient’s bedside rather like a cinder; the joints are admirable, but as it is found convenient to carve them up some time before the meal, and keep them likewise in the oven, a cut off the joint occasionally means a slice of leather. Attempts have been made from time to time by the administration to reform this style of cooking, but the reformation has not yet, in practice, been effected. After breakfast the patient reads or walks about. From one till three o’clock on Sundays and Thursdays he may receive visits from his family. At four o’clock the evening repast is served, and at eight the night commences, all conversation, as in English hospitals, abruptly ceasing. Thenceforth the repose of the vast wards is disturbed by nothing but the snoring of sleepers, and the sighs or groans of those to whose eyelids sleep will not come. The wards would now be in total darkness but for the faint glimmer of a little lamp suspended from the ceiling. [Illustration: THE CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL, RUE DE SÈVRES.]