In the store-room are rice, sugar, coffee, meal, and similar articles of food. From here she sends out at noon such portions as are needed for the most destitute of the district. In winter she also sells from her stores to the poor. Then there is a closet amply provided with sewing materials, and when the deaconess obtains work for seamstresses she furnishes them at a small price the necessary outfit to begin sewing. At two o'clock the deaconess ends her duties at the district house, and spends the remainder of the day in making visits in her quarter. To provide means to support the constant expenditure, there is in each quarter of the city a committee of fifteen ladies and three gentlemen, being in all more than one hundred ladies and twenty gentlemen, who are responsible for the administration of the charity. Each committee has a yearly collection in its district, and in this way about forty thousand francs are gathered annually. In each quarter nine hundred francs (one hundred and eighty dollars) is set apart for the maintenance of the sister and the rent of the district house. The remaining sum is expended by the deaconesses in their several districts in caring for the sick and destitute. Every month each one receives the sum allotted her from the treasurer, and in return reports her expenditure. The ladies on the committee often give personal assistance to the deaconess, and sometimes assume responsibility for individual cases, or for an entire street. The arrangements are constantly being improved upon as knowledge is gained by practice. The experience that has been gathered at Muelhausen is very practical, and therefore very valuable. Similar work could be undertaken in any of our large American cities, with the anticipation of like beneficent results. For that reason the above detailed description has been ventured upon, with the hope that the Old World example will find imitators in the New.[43] Similar institutions, although not so carefully perfected, are found in Gorlitz and Magdeburg. In Berlin are a good many deaconess institutions. Among them is the Marthashof, a training-school for servants, and a home for those out of employment. The first impulse to care for the girls who come to large cities to obtain work, and to provide them a home where they can have respectable surroundings, came from Pastor Vermeil, the founder of the deaconess house at Paris. When Fliedner visited the Paris house his heart was touched by what he saw. He thought of the thousands of girls coming annually to Berlin from the provinces, and of the exposures and temptations to which they were subjected. He knew that many of them in their ignorance and inexperience were ruined body and soul in the lodging-houses to which they resorted, and drifted away on the streets of the city, only to find a place eventually in the hopeless wards of the great hospital, La Charite.