ere these unfortunate creatures could take shelter, and that was
Mr. Pease's Five Points Mission, which contained so many women who had
been long in vicious courses, as to make it unsuitable for those who
were just on the dividing line.

Our plan for their relief took the shape of

THE GIRLS' LODGING-HOUSE.

It is no exaggeration to say that this instrument of charity and reform
has cost us more trouble than all our enterprises together.

The simple purpose and plan of it was, like that of our other efforts,
to reform habits and character through material and moral appliances,
and subsequently through an entire change of circumstances, and at the
same time to relieve suffering and misfortune.

We opened first a shelter, where any drifting, friendless girl could go
for a night's lodging. If she had means, she was to pay a trifling
sum--five or six cents; if not, she aided in the labor of the house, and
thus in part defrayed the expense of her board. Agents were sent out on
the docks and among the slums of the city to pick up the wayfarers;
notices were posted in the station-houses, and near the ferries and
railroads depots, and even advertisements put into the cheap papers. We
made a business of scattering the news of this charity wherever there
were forlorn girls seeking for home or protection, or street-wandering
young women who had no place to lay their heads.

We hoped to reach down the hand of welcome to the darkest dens of the
city, and call back to virtue some poor, unbefriended creature, who was
trembling on the very line between purity and vice. Our charity seemed
to stand by the ferries, the docks, the police-stations, and prisons,
and open a door of kindness and virtue to these hard-driven, tired
wanderers on the ways of life. Our design was that no young girl,
suddenly cast out on the streets of a great city, should be without a
shelter and a place where good influences could surround her. We opened
a House for the houseless; an abode of Christian sympathy for the
utterly unbefriended and misguided; a place of work for the idle and
unthrifty.

The plan seemed at once to reach its object: the doors opened on a
forlorn procession of unfortunates. Girls broke out of houses of vice,
where they had been entrapped, leaving every article of dress, except
what they wore, behind them; the police brought wretched young
wanderers, who had slept on the station-floors; the daughters of decent