It was in that year, on the 10th of May, that fourteen periwigged and powdered gentlemen met at the George Inn, in Ironmonger Lane, in order to discuss how they might best found an asylum for forty orphan children—that is to say, for twenty boys and twenty girls. They soon came to a solemn decision that there was a "sufficient subscription for carrying the scheme into execution," and a record to that effect was soberly entered in the very first clean page of the first minute-book of the Charity, with the additional memoranda that a committee {147} was chosen, and a treasurer appointed to collect and take care of the money necessary to support the undertaking. The early minute-books of this charity, by the way, are models of serious penmanship. Grave achievements of caligraphy, with engrossed headings, elaborate flourishes, and stiff formal hedge-rows of legal verbiage, suggestive of the fact that the secretaries were either attorneys or scriveners, and regarded the entries in a minute-book or the opening of a new account as very weighty and important events not to be lightly passed over. In this they were probably right: and, at all events, just so much of the old methodical exactitude has come down to the present day in the history of the institution, that the published accounts of the Orphan Working School have been referred to by the Times as models of condensation with a clearness of detail, which may be regarded as the best indication of a well-ordered and economical administration. It might not be too much to say that the old principle of carrying a scheme into execution only when there are sufficient subscriptions still characterises the operations of the institution. At all events, Mr. Soul had secured enough money for the completion of the new building at Margate before the actual work commenced, and his experience told him that funds would be forthcoming to maintain it. The founders of the original Orphan Working School, however, laid their wigs together to obtain a house ready built, and at last found one adapted to the purpose, in what was then the suburban district known as Hogsden—since gentilised into Hoxton. Like all really good work, the enterprise began to grow—there were so many orphans, and this was still the only general asylum maintained {148} by subscriptions—so that, as funds came in, two other adjoining houses were rented, and in seventeen years the number of inmates had increased from forty to 165.