The Patient in Room 18

I

St. Ann’s is an old hospital, sprawling in a great heap of weather-stained red brick and green ivy on the side of Thatcher Hill, a little east and south of the city of B⁠⸺. The building, though remodelled and added on to here and there, still retains the great, solid walls, the gumwood and walnut woodwork, the large, old-fashioned rooms, and the general air of magnificence and dignity that characterized what was known, in the grandiloquent nineties, as the Thatcher mansion.

Time has made changes; quantities of windows, low and wide, modern plumbing, electricity, a telephone to every floor, and added wings whose brick walls have been carefully weather-stained to match the original walls are some of them. On the west is the main entrance, an imposing affair of massive doors and great travertine pillars and curving driveway. But on the south, at the extreme end of the south wing, is another and less imposing entrance, a small, semicircular, colonial porch and a glass-paned door that leads from the hushed hospital corridor directly upon a narrow strip of grass and then shrubbery and apple orchard and willows and thickets of firs. From this door, too, is a path leading up and around the hill, and, considerably below and beyond the thickets of trees and brush, winds a road, dusty and seldom used.