The school-room is also the church and the lecture-hall. It will hold 300 people; and the Sunday-evening congregation fills it thoroughly, while, on week-nights, special services, and frequently lectures, entertainments, and attractive social gatherings bring the costers and their friends in great force. The chief of the costermongers is the Earl of Shaftesbury; {245} and here, standing as it were at livery in a quiet corner of a shanty close to the coal-shed, is the earl's barrow, emblazoned with his crest. This remarkable vehicle, and a donkey complimentarily named the "Earl," which took a prize at a Golden Lane donkey show, designate his lordship as president of the "Barrow Club," a flourishing institution, intended to supersede the usurious barrow-lenders, who once let out these necessary adjuncts to the costermongering business at a tremendous hire. Now the proprietors of the barrows, going on the hire and ultimate purchase-system, are prospering greatly. There are free evening classes, mothers' meetings, a free lending library, a free singing class, a penny savings bank, dinners to destitute children, numbering more than 10,000 a year, a soup-kitchen, tea-meetings, and other agencies, all of which are kept going morning, noon, and night, within the narrow limits of these two houses made into one. It is here, too, that the annual meeting is held, an account of which every year filters through the newspapers to the outer world—"The Costermongers' Annual Tea-Party." The records of this united and earnest assembly have been so recently given to the public, that I need not repeat them to you as we stand here in the lower rooms, whence the big cakes, the basins of tea, the huge sandwiches of bread and beef, were conveyed to the 200 guests. But as we depart, after shaking Mr. Harwood by the hand, let me remind you that it has been by the hearty, human, living influence of religion that these results have been effected. The stones of scientific or secular controversy have not been offered instead of food spiritual and temporal. The mission-hall has been made the centre; and from it has spread various healing, purifying, ameliorating influences. From {246} this we may well take a lesson for the benefit of another organised effort which appeals to us for help—that of the London City Mission. This institution is trying to effect for various districts and several classes of the poor and ignorant in and about London that introduction of religious teaching which Mr. Orsman began with amongst the costermongers and others in the benighted locality where now a clear light has begun to shine.