This was the site fixed on for the new infirmary; and in the _Monthly Recorder_ of February 17, 1682, you may read: “His Majesty went to Chelsey Colledge to lay the first stone, with several of the nobility, which is a place designed to be built and endowed by His Majesty for the relief of Indigent Officers, and Incouragement to serve His Majesty.” William and Mary finished the edifice; and it stands—an impressive monument of that union of proportion and of fitness by which Christopher Wren gave beauty to his plainest designs—in stately solidity in the midst of its thirty acres of ground. It is handsomely supported, not only by government aid, but by valuable donations. There are nearly eighty thousand out-pensioners and over five hundred inmates; these latter divided into companies, and doing mimic garrison duty in memory of their active days. Prints of their popular commanders hang all round the walls of the great hall west of the grand entrance, once a dining-room, now used for reading and smoking. In glass cases are the war medals left by veterans dying with no surviving relatives to claim them: on one we find nearly a dozen battles of the Peninsular campaigns; on another Badajos and Lucknow figure in curious conjunction; and rarest of all is one whose owner fought at Inkerman, Balaclava, and the Alma. In this hall the body of the great Duke lay in state amid the memorials of his victories, guarded by his own veterans: successors of those other veterans exultant over the news of Waterloo, whom Wilkie had painted, years before, for the Duke himself. [Picture: Chelsea Hospital, River Front] Framed on the wall is a record of the battles, sieges, marches of the Coldstream Guards; which tells us that this famous body is the sole surviving representative of the force which placed Charles II. on the throne, and thus became the nucleus of the standing army of England. The corps had been formed in 1650 by General George Monk, who made drafts of picked men from the various Cromwellian regiments, and led them on that famous march on the first day of the year 1660, from Coldstream to London, which saved the monarchy and gave the guard its historic name. In the chapel, beneath Sebastian Ricci’s great altar-piece, and under the tattered battle-flags, drooping faded and forlorn, you may see, on any Sunday, Hubert Herkomer’s picture in real life. It is a touching scene, this entry of the veterans into their chapel, preceded by their fife and drum: still more touching, the funeral of one of their dead, as they parade painfully from the infirmary, the lone drummer and fife playing the Dead March in Saul. In the quiet old burying-ground hard by, they lie compactly enough, the dead soldiers; and among them, women who have fought and died in men’s attire, their sex unsuspected until their death.