bbath morning, Dr. Wichern says, the pupils
resort hither to see that everything necessary is done to keep it in
perfect order. The air seemed almost heavy with the perfume of flowers;
and though the home of the living pupils of the Rauhe Haus is plain in
the extreme, the palace of their dead surpasses in splendor that of the
proudest of earthly monarchs. One could hardly help coveting such a
resting-place.

It was with reluctance that we at last turned our faces homeward, and
bade the excellent director farewell. The world has seen, in this
nineteenth century, few nobler spirits than his. Possessed of uncommon
intellect, he combines with it executive talent of no ordinary
character, and a capacity for labor which seems almost fabulous. His
duties as the head of the Inner Mission, whose scope comprises the
organization and management of reformatory institutions of all kinds,
throughout Germany, as well as efforts analogous to those of our city
missions, temperance societies, etc., might well be supposed to be
sufficient for one man; but these are supplementary to his labors as
director of the Rauhe Haus, and editor of the _Fliegende Blaetter_, and
the other literature, by no means inconsiderable, of the Inner Mission.
Dr. Wichern is highly esteemed and possesses almost unbounded influence
throughout Germany; and that influence, potent as it is, even with the
princes and crowned heads of the German States, is uniformly exerted in
behalf of the poor, the unfortunate, the ignorant, and the degraded.
When the history of philanthropy shall be written, and the just meed
of commendation bestowed on the benefactors of humanity, how much more
exalted a place will he receive, in the memory and gratitude of the
world, than the perjured and audacious despot who, born the same year,
in the neighboring city of the Hague, has won his way to the throne of
France by deeds of selfishness and cruelty! Even to-day, who would not
rather be John Henry Wichern, the director of the Rauhe Haus at Horn,
than Louis Napoleon, emperor of France?

Would that on our own side of the Atlantic a Wichern might arise, whose
abilities should be sufficient to unite in one common purpose our
reformatory enterprises, and rescue from infamy and sin the tens of
thousands of children who now, apt scholars in crime, throng the
purlieus of vice in our large cities, and are already committing deeds
whose desperate wickedness might well cause hardened criminals to