e a "canawl-boy," who cannot
steer his little craft in the city as well as he could his boat; or a
petty thief who wishes to reform his ways, or a bootblack who has
conceived the ambition of owning land, or a little "revolver" who hopes
to get quarters for nothing in a Lodging-house and "pitch pennies" in
the interval. Sometimes some yellow-haired German boy, stranded by
fortune in the city, will apply, with such honest blue eyes, that the
first employer that enters will carry him off; or a sharp, intelligent
Yankee lad, left adrift by sudden misfortune, comes in to do what he has
never done before--ask for assistance. Then an orphan-girl will appear,
floating on the waves of the city, having come here no one knows why,
and going no one can tell whither.

Employers call to obtain "perfect children;" drunken mothers rush in to
bring back their children they have already consented should be sent far
from poverty and temptation; ladies enter to find the best object of
their charities, and the proper field for their benevolent labors;
liberal donors; "intelligent foreigners," inquiring into our
institutions, applicants for teachers' places, agents, and all the
miscellaneous crowd who support and visit agencies of charity.

A PRACTICAL PHILANTHROPIST.

The central figure in this office, disentangling all the complicated
threads in these various applications, and holding himself perfectly
cool and bland in this turmoil, is "a character"--Mr. J. Macy.

He was employed first as a visitor for the Society; but, soon betraying
a kind of bottled-up "enthusiasm of humanity" under a very modest
exterior, he was put in his present position, where he has become a sort
of embodied Children's Aid Society in his own person. Most men take
their charities as adjuncts to life, or as duties enjoined by religion
or humanity. Mr. Macy lives in his. He is never so truly happy as when
he is sitting calmly amid a band of his "lambs," as he sardonically
calls the heavy-fisted, murderous-looking young vagabonds who frequent
the Cottage place Reading-room, and seeing them all happily engaged in
reading or quiet, amusements. Then the look of beatific satisfaction
that settles over his face, as, in the midst of a loving passage of his
religious address to them, he takes one of the obstreperous lambs by the
collar, and sets him down very hard on another bench--never for a moment
breaking the thread or sweet tone of his bland rem