When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not the decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality.--MADAME DE STAEL. Miss Nightingale’s work for the profession which her name and example had lifted into such high repute continued with unbated energy. The year 1871 brought what must have seemed like the crowning glory of her initial work when the Nightingale Home and Training School was opened as an integral portion of the new St. Thomas’s Hospital, the finest institution of its kind in Europe. This circumstance added greatly to the popularity of nursing as a profession for educated women. Queen Victoria had laid the foundation-stone of the new hospital on May 13th, 1868, on the fine site skirting the Thames Embankment opposite the Houses of Parliament. It was erected on the block system, which Miss Nightingale has always recommended, and she took a keen interest in all the model appliances and arrangements introduced into this truly palatial institution for the sick. The hospital extends from the foot of Westminster Bridge along the river to Lambeth Palace, and has a frontage of 1,700 ft. It is built in eight separate blocks or pavilions. The six centre blocks are for patients, the one at the north end next Westminster Bridge is for the official staff, and the one at the south end is used for lecture rooms and a school of medicine. Each block is 125 ft. from the other, but coupled by a double corridor. The corridor fronting the river forms a delightful terrace promenade. Each block has three tiers of wards above the ground floor. The operating theatre is capable of containing six hundred students. A special wing in one of the northern blocks was set apart for the Nightingale Home and Training School for Nurses. All the arrangements of this wing were carried out in accordance with Miss Nightingale’s wishes. The hospital contains in all one thousand distinct apartments, and the building cost half a million of money. It was opened by Queen Victoria on June 21st, 1871, and _The Times_ in its account of the proceedings is lost in admiration of “the lady nurses, in their cheerful dresses of light grey [blue is the colour of the Sisters’ dresses], ladies, bright, active, and different altogether from the old type of hospital nurse whom Dickens made us shudder to read of and Miss Nightingale is helping us to abolish.” The new building gave increased accommodation and provided for forty probationers. The rules for admission remained practically the same as when the Training School was first started at the old St. Thomas’s. At a dinner to inaugurate the opening of the new hospital, the Chairman, Sir Francis Hicks, related that Miss Nightingale had told him that she thought it “the noblest building yet erected for the good of our kind.”