y,
Miss Spratt, now Mrs. Hurley, who has been ever since the main-stay of
that most useful charity.

For seventeen years this woman of refinement and education has spent her
days in this School of poor children, and her hours of leisure in those
wretched shanties--an angel of mercy and sympathy to every unfortunate
family for miles around. Whatever woman falls into misfortune, loses
husband or child, is driven from home by poverty, or forced from work by
depression of business, or meets with troubles of mind or body, at once
comes to her for sympathy and relief. She has become so used to scenes
of misery, that to her, she says, "the house of mourning" is more
natural than "the house of feasting."

The present writer, for his own part, confesses that he could not
possibly have borne the harrowing and disagreeable scenes with which he
has been so long familiar, without making a strict rule never to think
or speak of the poor when he was away from his work, and immediately
absorbing himself in some entirely different subject. The spring of the
mind would have been broken.

But Mrs. Hurley lived in and for the poor; her only relaxation was
hearing Mr. Beecher on Sunday; and yet, when she occasionally visited us
in the country, she devoured books--her great favorite being a
translation I had of Plato.

The children, of course, became passionately attached to this missionary
of charity. During her labors, she was married to a physician, Dr.
Hurley, who subsequently was killed in the army during the War of the
Rebellion. While she was temporarily absent, and a strange teacher
employed, six of the wildest girls were expelled, so unmanageable were
they. When she came back, they returned and welcomed her eagerly,
behaving perfectly well; and it was discovered that so attached were
they to her, they had each carried fragments of her dress as mementos in
their bosom!

The peculiar value of our common experience in this School was, that we
were enabled through so many years to follow carefully the results of
the School on a large class of very destitute little girls. We know
personally what was here accomplished. A very hopeful feature appeared
soon in the work. The children rose above the condition of their
parents; sometimes they improved, by their own increasing neatness and
good behavior, the habits and appearance of their fathers and mothers.
More often they became ashamed of their paternal piggeries and nasty
dens, and