with the police."

The constables in the neighbourhood all know Miss Macpherson's Refuge,
and her readiness to take boys in at any time; so that many little
vagrants are brought thither by them and reclaimed, instead of being
locked up and sent to prison, to go from bad to worse. Besides this
receptacle for boys, Miss Macpherson has also a Home at Hackney, where
girls of the same class are housed. The plan she adopts is to get a
friend to be responsible for one child. The cost she reckons at _6l.
10s._ per annum for those under ten years, and _10l._ for those above.

But this excellent lady's good works are by no means catalogued yet.
Besides the children being fed and taught in these Homes, the parents
and children are constantly gathered for sewing classes, tea meetings,
&c. at the Refuge. Above 400 children are thus influenced; and Miss
Macpherson, with her coadjutors, systematically visits the wretched dens
and lodging-houses into which no well-dressed person, unless favourably
known like her for her work among the children, would dare to set foot.
I was also present when a hearty meal of excellent soup and a large lump
of bread were given to between three and four hundred men, chiefly dock
labourers out of employ. It was a touching sight to notice the stolid
apathy depicted on most of the countenances, which looked unpleasantly
like despair. One of the men assured me that for every package that had
to be unladen from the docks there were ten pair of hands ready to do
the work, where only one could be employed. Many of the men, he assured
me, went for two, sometimes three, days without food; and with the large
majority of those assembled the meal they were then taking would
represent the whole of their subsistence for the twenty-four-hours.
After supper a hymn was sung, and a few words spoken to them by Miss
Macpherson on the allegory of the Birds and Flowers in the Sermon on the
Mount; and so they sallied forth into the darkness of Arabia Petraea. I
mounted to the little boys' bedroom, where the tiniest Arabs of all
were enjoying the luxury of a game, with bare feet, before retiring.
Miss Macpherson dragged a mattress off one of the beds and threw it down
in the centre for them to tumble head-over-tail; and, as she truly said,
it was difficult to recognise in those merry shouts and happy faces any
remains of the veriest reprobates of the London streets.

Let us hear Miss Macpherson herself speak. In a published p