But I have left out one thing now. Among this great representative company of refugees were 60 children, of whom 37 were sent to nurse or to school, while those who were old enough— Well, just listen to that burst of military music in a distant upper-room of the old slaughter-house. I must tell you something about the Newport Market boys in another chapter. {200} TAKING IN STRANGERS. Yes; listen to that startling clangour of military music coming from an upper room. We are standing, you know, in the cheerful kitchen of that Refuge for the Homeless in the renovated old slaughter-house in Newport Market, and I want you to come with me to see the boys' school, which occupies a very considerable portion of that weatherproof but ramshackle building. Only those who are acquainted with the poverty and the crime of this great metropolis can estimate the deep and urgent need that still exists for refuges in which homeless, destitute, and neglected children can be received for shelter, food, and clothing. Only the practical student of the effect of our present administration of the Education Act can calculate how vast a necessity is likely to exist for the reception and instruction of the children of the poorest, even when all the machinery of the present School Board is put in motion for vindicating the compulsory clause. Let that clause be interpreted in the most liberal manner—which would be in effect to provide State education without cost to the parents—and the Act will still leave untouched a vast number of children for whom {201} nothing can be done until their physical necessities are provided for—children who are perishing with cold, starving for want of food. A visit to some of the big buildings recently erected by the London School Board will reveal the fact that there are many such children now in attendance; neglected, barefoot, half-clothed, hungry, and with that wistful eager look, sometimes followed by a kind of stupefaction, which may be observed in the poor little outcasts of the streets. There is no reasonable hope of doing much with these little creatures till the "soup-kitchen" and the "free breakfast" are among the appliances of education, where the necessity is most pressing, and the children perish for lack of bread as well as for lack of knowledge. As it is—I need not refer again to the escape which is always open from the streets to the prison. The few Government industrial-schools to which magistrates occasionally consign young culprits brought before them are intended only for those who come within the cognisance of the law. The operations of these reformatory-schools are successful so far as they go. They represent seventy-five per cent. of successful reformatory training as applied to juvenile transgressors committed by magistrates to their supervision.