he houses they built, beginning
with the one on East Broadway: Miss Catharine L. Wolfe, Mrs. Robert L.
Stuart, John Jacob Astor, Morris K. Jesup. The girls' home in East Twelfth
Street, just completed, was built as a memorial to Miss Elizabeth
Davenport Wheeler by her family, and is to be known as the Elizabeth Home.
The list might be greatly extended by including the twenty-one Industrial
Schools, which are in fact links in the same great chain; but that is not
to the present purpose, and probably I should not be thanked for doing it.
I have already transgressed enough. The wealth that seeks its
responsibilities among the outcast children in this city, is of the kind
that prefers that it should remain unidentified and unheralded to the
world in connection with its benefactions.

It is in these lodging-houses that one may study the homelessness that
mocks the miles of brick walls which enclose New York's tenements, but
not its homes. Only with special opportunities is it nowadays possible to
study it anywhere else in New York. One may still hunt up by night waifs
who make their beds in alleys and cellars and abandoned sheds. This last
winter two stable fires that broke out in the middle of the night routed
out little colonies of boys, who slept in the hay and probably set it on
fire. But one no longer stumbles over homeless waifs in the street
gutters. One has to hunt for them and to know where. The "cruelty man"
knows and hunts them so assiduously that the game is getting scarcer every
day. The doors of the lodging-houses stand open day and night, offering
shelter upon terms no cold or hungry lad would reject: six cents for
breakfast and supper, six for a clean bed. They are not pauper barracks,
and he is expected to pay; but he can have trust if his pockets are empty,
as they probably are, and even a bootblack's kit or an armful of papers to
start him in business, if need be. The only conditions are that he shall
wash and not swear, and attend evening school when his work is done. It is
not possible to-day that an outcast child should long remain supperless
and without shelter in New York, unless he prefers to take his chances
with the rats of the gutter. Such children there are, but they are no
longer often met. The winter's cold drives even them to cover and to
accept the terms they rejected in more hospitable seasons. Even the
"dock-rat" is human.

It seems a marvel that he is, sometimes, when one hears the story o