teers" have withdrawn or leave the work, others
appear, and there are still in this and some of our other Industrial
Schools, most active and efficient voluntary helpers. Gradually,
however, the support and supervision of the Schools fell more and more
into the hands of the central authority--The Children's Aid Society.

The obtaining a share in the Common School Fund enabled the Society to
do more for these useful charities and to found new ones.

In the Hudson River School, it cannot be said that the Protestant poor
proved much better than the Catholic; in fact, it has often seemed to me
that when a Protestant is reduced to extreme poverty, and, above all, a
Yankee, he becomes the most wretched and useless of all paupers. The
work and its results were similar on the west side to those in the other
districts which I have already described.

"MUSCULAR ORPHANS."

Our attention had thus far been directed mainly to girls in these
Industrial School efforts. They seemed the class exposed to the most
terrible evils, and besides, through our other enterprises, we were
sheltering, teaching, and benefiting for life vast numbers of lads.

We determined now to try the effect of industry and schooling on the
roving boys, and I chose a district where we had to make head against a
"sea of evils." This was in the quarter bordering on East Thirty-fourth
Street and Second Avenue. There seemed to be there a society of
irreclaimable little vagabonds. They hated School with an
inextinguishable hatred; they had a constitutional love for smashing
windows and pilfering apple-stands. They could dodge an "M. P." as a fox
dodges a hound; they disliked anything so civilized as a bed-chamber,
but preferred old boxes and empty barns, and when they were caught it
required a very wide-awake policeman, and such an Asylum-yard as hardly
exists in New York, to keep them.

I have sometimes stopped, admiringly, to watch the skill and cunning
with which the little rascals, some not more than ten years old, would
diminish a load of wood left on the docks; the sticks were passed from
one to another, and the lad nearest the pile was apparently engaged
eagerly in playing marbles. If the woodman's attention was called to his
loss, they were off like a swarm of cockroaches.

[Illustration: STREET ARABS.]

We opened a School with all the accessories for reaching and pleasing
them; our teacher was a skillful mechanic, a young man