tory below filed off in regular order to their several
berths. The residue left the premises. We visiters were next permitted
to go down and see those who staid--of course only the ladies being
allowed to look into the apartment of the women. O the sadness of that
sight! There in the men's room were perhaps a hundred men and boys,
sitting up in their rags in little compartments of naked boards, each
about half-way between a bread-tray and a hog-trough, which, planted
close to each other, were to be their resting-places for the night, as
they had been for several previous nights. And this is a very recent and
very blessed addition to the School, made by the munificence of some
noble woman, who gave $500 expressly to fit up some kind of a
sleeping-room, so that those who had attended the School should not
_all_ be turned out (as a part still necessarily are) to wander or lie
all night in the always cold, damp streets. There are not many hogs in
America who are not better lodged than these poor human brethren and
sisters, who now united, at the suggestion of the superintendent, in a
hymn of praise to God for all His mercies. Doubtless, many did so with
an eye to the shelter and hope of food (for each one who is permitted to
stay here has a bath and six ounces of bread allowed him in the
morning); yet when I contrasted this with the more formal and stately
worship I had attended at Westminster Abbey in the morning, the
preponderance was decidedly not in favor of the latter.

It seemed to me a profanation--an insult heaped on injury--an
unjustifiable prying into the saddest secrets of the great prison-house
of human woe--for us visiters to be standing here; and, though I
apologised for it with a sovereign, which grain of sand will, I am sure,
be wisely applied to the mitigation of this mountain of misery, I was
yet in haste to be gone. Yet I leaned over the rail and made some
inquiry of a ragged and forlorn youth of nineteen or twenty who sat next
us in his trough, waiting for our departure before he lay down to such
rest as that place could afford him. He replied that he had no parents
nor friends who could help him--had never been taught any trade--always
did any work he could get--sometimes earned six-pence to a shilling per
day by odd jobs, but could get no work lately--had no money, of
course--and had eaten nothing that day but the six ounces of bread given
him on rising here in the morning--and had only the like six oun