{128} These thoughtful workers included among them two men of practical experience; one of them, Mr. H. R. Williams, the treasurer of the present institution, the other the Rev. William Tyler, whose bright genial presence has long been a power among the poor of that district, where even the little ragged children of the streets follow him, and lisp out his name as the faithful shepherd, who both gives and labours in one of the truest "cures of souls" to be found in all great London. To them soon came the present honorary secretary, Mr. J. H. Lloyd, a gentleman already familiar with teaching the poor in a neighbouring district no less wretched and neglected. They were the right men for the business in hand, and therefore they began by moving sluggish boards and commissions to put in force the sanitary laws—and, in spite of the opposition of landlords with vested interests in vile tenements let out to whole families of lodgers from garret to basement, and of the malignant opposition of owners of hovels where every abomination was rife, and pigs littered in the yards, while costermongers shared the cellars with their donkeys—insisted on the surrounding streets being paved and drained, and some of the houses being whitewashed and made weatherproof. Nothing less could have been done, for the terrible cholera epidemic was already raging in that tangle of courts and alleys. Application was at once made for a share from the Mansion House Relief Fund, and the committee had to use every available shilling in order to supply food and medicine, blankets and clothing, to the wretched families; to visit whom, a regular relief corps was organised, carrying on its beneficent and self-denying work, until the plague began to be stayed. Then {129} with scarcely any money, but with unabated hope and fervid faith, this little company of men and women began to consider what they should do to found a Refuge for the children (many of them orphans, and quite friendless) who were everywhere to be seen wandering about, or alone and utterly destitute in the bare rooms that had been their homes. There were already certain institutions to which boys could be sent, for then, as now, the provision for boys was far greater than for girls. This is one of the strange, almost inexplicable conditions of charitable effort, and at that time it was so obvious which was the greater need, that the committee at once determined to commence a building on a waste piece of land which had been purchased close by, and to devote it to the reception of thirty destitute girls, who should be snatched from deadly contamination, and from the association of thieves and depraved companions.