trained in dishonesty. They are disgustingly dirty, and all
but the missionaries shrink from contact with them. The majority are old
looking and ugly, but a few have bright, intelligent faces. From the
time they are capable of receiving impressions, they are thrown into
constant contact with vice and crime. They grow up to acquire surely and
steadily the ways of their elders. The boys recruit the ranks of the
pickpockets, thieves, and murderers of the city; the girls become waiters
in the concert halls, or street walkers, and thence go down to ruin,
greater misery and death.

In winter and summer suffering is the lot of the Five Points. In the
summer the heat is intense, and the inmates of the houses pour out into
the filthy streets to seek relief from the torture to which they are
subjected indoors. In winter they are half frozen with cold. The
missionaries and the police tell some dreary stories of this quarter. A
writer in a city journal thus describes a visit made in company with the
missionary of the Five Points House of Industry to one of these homes of
sorrow:

"The next place visited was a perfect hovel. Mr. Shultz, in passing
along a narrow dark hall leading towards the head of the stairs, knocked
at an old door, through which the faintest ray of light was struggling.
'Come in,' said a voice on the opposite side of the room. The door being
opened, a most sickening scene appeared. The room was larger than the
last one, and filthier. The thin outside walls were patched with pieces
of pasteboard, the floor was covered with dirt, and what straggling
pieces of furniture they had were lying about as if they had been shaken
up by an earthquake. There was a miserable fire, and the storm outside
howled and rattled away at the old roof, threatening to carry it off in
every succeeding gust. The tenants were a man, his wife, a boy, and a
girl. They had sold their table to pay their rent, and their wretched
meal of bones and crusts was set on an old packing box which was drawn
close up to the stove. When the visitors entered the man and woman were
standing, leaning over the stove. The girl, aged about ten years, and a
very bright looking child, having just been off on some errand, had got
both feet wet, and now had her stockings off, holding them close to the
coals to dry them. The boy seemed to be overgrown for his age, and half
idiotic. He sat at one corner of the stove, his back to the visitors,
and