their hearts are in the work. The schools themselves, like the
Society's lodging-houses for homeless children, stand as lasting monuments
to a Christian charity that asks no other reward than the consciousness of
having done good where the need was great. Sometimes the very name of the
generous giver is unknown to all the world save the men who built as he or
she directed. The benefactor is quite as often a devoted woman as a rich
and charitable man, who hides his munificence under a modesty unsuspected
by a community that applauds and envies his shrewd and successful
business ventures, but never hears of the investment that paid him and it
best of all.

According to its location, the school is distinctively Italian, Bohemian,
Hebrew or mixed; the German, Irish, and colored children coming in under
this head, and mingling usually without the least friction. The Leonard
Street School and the West Side Italian School in Sullivan Street are
devoted wholly to the little swarthy Southerners. In the Leonard Street
School alone there were between five and six hundred Italian children on
the register last year; but in the Beach Street School, and in the Astor
Memorial School in Mott Street they are fast crowding the Irish element,
that used to possess the land, to the wall. So, in Monroe Street and East
Broadway are the Jewish children. Neither the teachers nor the Society's
managers are in any danger of falling into sleepy routine ways. The
conditions with which they have to deal are constantly changing; new
problems are given them to solve before the old are fairly worked out, old
prejudices to be forgotten or worked over into a new and helpful interest.
And they do it bravely, and are more than repaid for their devotion by the
real influence they find themselves exerting upon the young lives which
had never before felt the touch of genuine humane sympathy, or been
awakened to the knowledge that somebody cared for them outside of their
own dark slum.

All the children are not as tractable as the Russian Jews or the Italians.
The little Irishman, brimful of mischief, is, like his father, in the
school and in the street, "ag'in' the government" on general principles,
though in a jovial way that often makes it hard to sit in judgment on his
tricks with serious mien. He feels, too, that to a certain extent he has
the sympathy of his father in his unregenerate state, and is the more to
be commended if he subdues the old Adam in h