ng the miserable poor of the ward, and twice
found herself face to face with small-pox in its most virulent form.

The effects of this particular School upon the morals of the juvenile
population of the Fourth Ward were precisely what they have always been
in similar schools. These little girls, who might be said to be almost
the inmates of the brothels, and who grew up in an atmosphere of crime
and degradation, scarcely ever, when mature, joined the ranks of their
sisters and neighbors. Though living in the same houses with the gay
dance-saloons, they avoided them as they would pestilential places.
Trained to industry and familiar with the modest and refined appearance
of pure women in the schools, they had no desire for the society of
these bold girls, or to earn their living in this idle and shameful
manner. They felt the disgrace of the abandoned life around them, and
were soon above it. Though almost invariably the children of drunkards,
they did not inherit the appetites of their mothers, or if they did,
their new training substituted higher and stronger desires. They were
seldom known to have the habit of drinking as they grew up. Situations
were continually found for them in the country, or they secured places
for themselves as servants in respectable families; and, becoming each
day more used to better circumstances and more neatly dressed, they had
little desire to visit their own wretched homes and remain in their
families. Now and then there would be a fall from virtue among them, but
the cases were very few indeed. As they grew up they married young
mechanics or farmers, and were soon far above the class from which they
sprang. Such were the fruits in general of the patient, self-denying
labors of these ladies in the Fourth Ward School.

One most self-sacrificing and heroic man, a physician, Dr. Robert Ray,
devoted his education and something of his fortune to these benevolent
efforts, and died while in the harness. Singularly enough, I never knew,
in twenty years' experience, an instance of one of these volunteer
teachers contracting any contagious disease in these labors, though
repeatedly they have entered tenement rooms where virulent typhoid or
small-pox cases were being tended. They made it a rule generally to
bathe and change their clothing after their work.

For a more exact account of the results of the Fourth-Ward labors, it is
difficult to obtain precise statistics. But when we know from the Pri