And so, sure enough, following the hoop, I come to an old-fashioned house in a court-yard, and ring at a wooden door, on which "Girls' Industrial Schools" is painted up in white letters.

A little industrious girl, in a lilac pinafore, let me in, with a courtesy.

"May I come in and see the place?" say I.

"Please, yes," says she (another courtesy). "Please, what name? please walk this way."

"This way" leads through the court, where clothes are hanging on lines, into a little office-room, where my guide leaves me, with yet another little courtesy. In a minute the mistress comes out from the inner room. She is a kind,

smiling young woman, with a fresh face and a pleasant manner. She takes me in, and I see a dozen more girls in lilac pinafores reading round a deal table. They look mostly about thirteen or fourteen years old. I ask if this is all the school.

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No, not all," the mistress says, counting; 66 some are in the laundry, and some are not at home. When they are old enough, they go out into the neighborhood to help to wash, or cook, or what not. Go on, girls!" and the girls instantly begin to read again, and the mistress, opening a door, brings us out into the passage. "We have room for twenty-two," says the little mistress; "and we dress them, and feed them, and teach them as well as we can. On week-days they wear anything we can find for them, but they have very nice frocks on Sundays. I never leave them; I sit with them, and sleep among them, and walk with them; they are always friendly and affectionate to me and among themselves, and are very good companions."

In answer to my questions, she said that most of the children were put in by friends who paid half a crown a week for them, sometimes the parents themselves, but they could rarely afford it. That besides this, and what the girls

could earn, £ 200 a year is required for the rent of the house and expenses. "It has always been made up,” says the mistress," but we can't help being very anxious at times, as we have nothing certain, nor any regular subscriptions. Won't you see the laundry?" she adds, opening a door.

In the laundry is a steam, and a clatter, and irons, and linen, and a little mangle, turned by two little girls, while two or three more are busy ironing under the superintendence of a washerwoman with tucked-up sleeves; piles of shirt-collars and handkerchiefs and linen are lying on the shelves, shirts and clothes are hanging on lines across the room. The little girls don't stop, but go on busily.

"Where is Mary Anne?" says the mistress, with a little conscious pride.

"There she is, mum," says the washerwoman, and Mary Anne steps out, blushing, from behind the mangle, with a hot iron in her hand and a hanging head.

"Mary Anne is our chief laundry-maid," says the mistress, as we came out into the hall again. "For the first year I could make nothing of her; she was miserable in the kitchen, she could n't bear housework, she would n't learn her lessons. In fact, I was quite unhappy about her, till one day I set her to ironing; she took to it instantly, and has been quite cheerful and busy ever since."

So leaving Mary Anne to her vocation in life, we went ap-stairs to the dormitories. The first floor is let to a lady, and one of the girls is chosen to wait upon her; the second floor is where they sleep, in fresh light rooms with open windows and sweet spring breezes blowing in across gardens and court-yards. The place was delightfully trim and fresh and peaceful; the little gray-coated beds stood in rows, with a basket at the foot of each, and texts were hanging up on the wall. In the next room stood a wardrobe full of the girls' Sunday clothes, of which one of them keeps the key; after this came the mistress's own room, as fresh and light and well kept as the rest.

These little maidens scrub and cook and wash and sew. They make broth for the poor, and puddings. They are taught to read and write and count, and they learn geography and history as well. Many of them come from dark, unwholesome alleys in the neighborhood, from a dreary country of dirt and crime and foul talk. In this little convent all is fresh and pure, and the sunshine pours in at every window. I don't know that the life is very exciting there, or that the days spent at the mangle, or round the deal table, can be very stirring ones. But surely they are well spent, learning useful arts, and order and modesty and cleanliness. Think of the cellars and slums from which these children come, and of the quiet little haven where they are fitted for the struggle of life, and are taught to be good and industrious and sober and honest. It is only for a year or two, and then they will go out into the world again, into a world, indeed, of which we know but little, a world of cooks and kitchen-maids and general servants. I daresay these little industrious girls, sitting round that table and spelling out the Gospel of St. John this sunny afternoon, are longing and wistfully thinking about that wondrous coming time. Meanwhile the quiet hour goes by. I say farewell to the kind, smiling mistress; Mary Anne is still busy among her irons; I hear the mangle click as I pass, and the wooden door opens to let me out.

In another old house, standing in a deserted old square near the city, there is a school which interested me as much as any of those I have come across, a school for little Jewish boys and girls. We find a tranquil, roomy cld house, with light windows looking out into the quiet square with its ancient garden; a carved staircase; a little hall paved with black and white mosaic, whence two doors lead respectively to the Boys' and Girls' schools. Presently a little girl unlocks one of these doors, and runs up before us into the school-room, - a long, well-lighted room full of other

little girls busy at their desks: little Hebrew maidens with Oriental faces, who look up at us as we come in. This is always rather an alarming moment; but Dr. who knows

the children, comes kindly to our help, and begins to tell us about the school. "It is an experiment," he says, "and one which has answered admirably well. Any children are admitted, Christians as well as Jews; and none come without paying something every week, twopence or threepence, as they can afford, for many of them belong to the very poorest of the Jewish community. They receive a very high class of education." (When I presently see what they are doing, and hear the questions they can answer, I begin to feel a very great respect for these little bits of girls in pinafores, and for the people who are experimenting on them.) "But the chief aim of the school is to teach them to help themselves, and to inculcate an honest selfdependence and independence." And, indeed, as I look at them, I cannot but be struck with a certain air of respectability and uprightness among these little creatures, as they sit there, so self-possessed, keen-eyed, well-mannered. "Could you give them a parsing lesson?" the doctor asks the schoolmistress, who shakes her head, and says it is their day for arithmetic, and she may not interrupt the order of their studies; but that they may answer any questions the doctor likes to put to them.

Quite little things, with their hair in curls, can tell you about tons and hundredweights, and how many horses it would take to draw a ton, and how many little girls to draw two thirds of a ton, if so many little girls went to a horse; and if a horse were added, or a horse taken away, or two eighths of the little girls, or three fourths of the horse, or one sixth of the ton, - until the room begins to spin breathlessly round and round, and I am left ever so far behindhand.

"Is avoirdupois an English word?" Up goes a little

hand, with fingers working eagerly, and a pretty little creature, wi.h long black hair and a necklace, cries out that it is French, and means, have weight.

Then the doctor asks about early English history, and the hands still go up, and they know all about it; and so they do about civilization, and despotism, and charters, and Picts and Scots, and dynasties, and early lawgivers, and colonization, and reformation.

"Who was Martin Luther? Why did he leave the Catholic Church? What were indulgences?"

"You gave the Pope lots of money, sir, and he gave you dispensations." This was from our little portress.

There was another little shrimp of a thing, with wonderful, long-slit, flashing eyes, who could answer anything almost, and whom the other little girls accordingly brought forward in triumph from a back row.

"Give me an instance of a free country?" asks the tired questioner.

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England, sir!" cry the little girls in a shout.

"And now of a country which is not free."

"America," cry two little voices; and then one adds, "Because there are slaves, sir." "And France," says a third; "and we have seen the emperor in the pictureshops."

As I listen to them, I cannot help wishing that many of our little Christians were taught to be as independent and self-respecting in their dealings with the grown-up people who come to look at them. One would fancy that servility was a sacred institution, we cling to it so fondly. We seem to expect an absurd amount of respect from our inferiors; we are ready to pay back just as much to those above us in station: and hence I think, notwithstanding all the kindness of heart, all the well-meant and well-spent exertion we see in the world, there is often toc great an inequality between those who teach and those who would learn, those who give and those whose harder part it is to receive.