It is managed on soundly scientific principles, without the least fuss, or any 'board of trustees' or 'committee of management,' or any of that cumbrous administration which makes so many public hospitals as intricate as labyrinths, only to be threaded with a clue of red tape, and proportionately unpractical.
There is a still and sunny garden within, surrounded by a wide and dry cloister, above which the ancient building rises only one story on the three sides of the square; but on the fourth side, which looks towards the sun at noon, there are three stories, which have been built lately, and the hospital wards are in that wing, one above the other.
On the opposite side, a door opens from the cloister to the choir of the church, which has also an outer entrance from the street, now rarely used; for the chaplain comes and goes through the cloister, the vestibule, and the green door where the portress is.
Beyond her lodge there is a wide hall, with clerestory windows and glass doors opening to the cloister and the garden; and from this hall the hospital itself is reached by a passage through which all the patients are taken.

The Mother Superior's rooms are those above the cloister on the further side of the garden, and have three beautiful thirteenth century windows divided by pairs of slender columns, so that each window has two little arches.
In the middle of the garden there is an old well with three arches of carved stone that spring from three pillars and meet above the centre of the well-head, and the double iron chain runs over a wheel, and has two wrought copper buckets, one at each end of it; but the water is now used only for watering the flowers.

There are stone seats round the well, too, on which three old nuns often sit and sun themselves on fine days.

They are the last of the Sisters of the old time, when there was no hospital and no training school, and the nuns used to do anything in the way of nursing that was asked of them by rich or poor, with a good heart and a laudable intention, but without even the simplest elements of modern prophylaxis, because it had not been invented then.

For that has all been discovered quite recently, as we older men can remember only too well.
There are many roses in the garden, and where there is most sun there is a large bed of carnations, but not of the finer sorts; they are just plain red and white ones, that fill the air with a scent of warm cloves on still mornings in the late spring, when it is beginning to be hot.