his soon became impracticable.

Each applicant or employer always called for "a perfect child," without
any of the taints of earthly depravity. The girls must be pretty,
good-tempered, not given to purloining sweetmeats, and fond of making
fires at daylight, and with a constitutional love for Sunday Schools and
Bible-lessons. The boys must be well made, of good stock, never disposed
to steal apples or pelt cattle, using language of perfect propriety, and
delighting in family-worship and prayer-meetings more than in fishing or
skating parties. These demands, of course, were not always successfully
complied with. Moreover, to those who desired the children of "blue
eyes, fair hair, and blond complexion," we were sure to send the
dark-eyed and brunette; and the particular virtues wished for were very
often precisely those that the child was deficient in. It was evidently
altogether too much of a lottery for bereaved parents or benevolent
employers to receive children in that way.

Yet, even under this incomplete plan, there were many cases like the
following, which we extract from our Journal:--

A WAIF.

"In visiting, during May last, near the docks at the foot of
Twenty-third Street, I found a boy, about twelve years of age, sitting
on the wharf, very ragged and wretched-looking. I asked him where he
lived, and he made the answer one hears so often from these children--'I
don't live nowhere.' On further inquiry, it appeared that his parents
had died a few years before--that his aunt took him for a while, but,
being a drunken woman, had at length turned him away; and for some time
he had slept in a box in Twenty-second Street, and the _boys fed him,_
he occasionally making a sixpence with holding horses or doing an
errand. He had eaten nothing that day, though it was afternoon. I gave
him something to eat, and he promised to come up the next day to the
office.

"He came up, and we had a long talk together. He was naturally an
intelligent boy, of good temperament and organization; but in our
Christian city of New York he had never heard of Jesus Christ! His
mother, long ago, had taught him a prayer, and occasionally he said this
in the dark nights, lying on the boards. * * * Of schools or churches,
of course, he knew nothing. We sent him to a gentleman in Delaware, who
had wished to make the experiment of bringing up a vagrant boy of the
city. He thus writes at his arrival:--

"'The b