comes out. No old papers, or else none. If they would get some other
boys to get me some books. I want something to read.

"I hope this letter will find you in good health, as it leaves me. Mr.
O'Connor, I expect an answer before two weeks--a letter and a paper.
Write to me all about the Lodging-house. With this I close my letter,
with much respect to all.
"'I remain your truly obedient friend,
"'J. K.'"

CHAPTER XXII.

A PRACTICAL PHILANTHROPIST AMONG THE YOUNG "ROUGHS."

A sketch of the long and successful efforts for the improvement of the
dangerous classes we have been describing would be imperfect without an
account of

THE OFFICE OF THE CHILDREN'S AID SOCIETY.

This has become a kind of eddying-point, where the two streams of the
fortunate and the unfortunate classes seem to meet. Such a varying
procession of humanity as passes through these plain rooms, from one
year's end to the other, can nowhere else be seen. If photographs could
be taken of the human life revealed there, they would form a volume of
pictures of the various fortunes of large classes in a great city. On
one day, there will be several mothers with babes. They wish them
adopted, or taken by any one. They relate sad stories of desertion and
poverty; they are strangers or immigrants. When the request is declined,
they beseech, and say that the child must die, for they cannot support
both. It is but too plain that, they are illegitimate children; As they
depart, the horrible feeling presses on one, that the child will soon
follow the fate of so many thousands born out of wedlock. Again, a
pretty young woman comes to beg a home for the child of some friend, who
cannot support it. Her story need not be told; the child is hers, and is
the offspring of shame. Or some person from the higher classes enters,
to inquire for the traces of some boy, long disappeared--the child of
passion and sin.

But the ordinary frequenters are the children of the street--the Arabs
and gypsies of our city.

Here enters a little flower-seller, her shawl drawn over her head,
barefooted and ragged--she begs for a home and bread; here a newsboy,
wide-awake and impudent, but softened by his desire to "get West;" here
"a bummer," ragged, frouzy, with tangled hair and dirty face, who has
slept for years in boxes and privies; her