There are sometimes remarkable varieties here—emigrants waiting for ships to sail that will bear them to another land; men of education, such as tutors, engineers, engravers, and professional men, who have been unsuccessful, or have lost their position, often through no immediate fault of their own. Of course, the large class of genteel poverty is largely represented in the five or six hundred cases which make the average number of yearly inmates. Clerks, shopmen, and travellers are about as numerous as servants, porters, and pages. Poor women, many of whom are ladies by birth or previous position and education, find the House of Charity a refuge indeed, and feel that the person who has charge of the household arrangements, as well as those who have charge of the inmates, the accounts and correspondence, may be appealed to with an assurance of true sympathy. Here, beside the two sitting-rooms, is a large room which we will call the refectory; it is plainly furnished, with separate tables for men and women, and the quantity and description of the food supplied is such as would be provided in a respectable and well-ordered family—tea or coffee and plenty of good bread-and-butter morning and evening, meat, bread and vegetables, for dinner, and a supper of bread and cheese. There are no "rations," nor any special limit as to quantity, and if one could forget the distress which brings them hither, the family might be regarded as belonging to some comfortable business {225} establishment, with good plain meals and club-room on each side the dining-hall for meeting in after working hours. Let us go upstairs, and look at the dormitories, which occupy respectively the right and left side of the building, and we shall see that they are so arranged as to secure that privacy, the want of which would be most repulsive to persons of superior condition. Each long and lofty room is divided into a series of enclosures or cabins by substantial partitions about eight feet high, and in each of these separate rooms—all of which are lighted by several windows or by gas-branches in the main apartment—there is a neat comfortable bed and bedstead, with space for a box, a seat, and a small table or shelf. A resident chaplain or warden conducts morning and evening prayer in the chapel, which is built on part of the open area at the back of the building; and I would have you consider, not only that to many of these weary souls this sacred spot may come to be associated with that outcome to renewed life for which their presence in the Institution gives them reason to hope, but that it is most desirable for the invalids, who frequently form so large a portion of the congregation, to be able to attend worship without practically leaving the house. Not only because of the sick and the physically feeble, however, does the House of Charity represent a work that needs vast extension.