The tact, management, and energy displayed by Mr. Nash in forming and establishing the St. Ann Street dormitory deserve every praise; but the ground was in some measure prepared for him by his former principal. The manner in which this was done shows “the power of small beginnings,” even in a stronger light than was exhibited in your article with that title.[3] Footnote 3: At page 407. In the year 1840 it became my duty to enquire into the condition of what are but too literally the outcasts of society; and for that purpose obtained introductions to several city missionaries—adequate description of the scenes of harrowing want, disease, and crime into which those gentlemen introduced me, it would be impossible to pen. They alone seemed able to penetrate the dark moral atmosphere. They were always welcomed even by the poorest and the worst. As one specimen of the efforts made by the Westminster missionaries, I was introduced to a dilapidated shed in New Pye Street. Here I found several young children of both sexes, in rags, and some nearly naked. The scene was most grotesque; the clotted hair, the mud-covered hands and faces, and the haggard countenances, at once told a tale which would have pierced the coldest heart. They were being taught reading and needlework. They were not particularly orderly and some showed a quaint, pantomimic, half-witted disposition to be funny, which pained rather than amused the spectator. Most of them were the sons and daughters of thieves. The small beginning which gave rise to the general idea of Ragged Dormitories took rise in an event for which I can vouch. The missionary who had formed this school was standing one day, in 1846, at its door, when two adult thieves appealed to him in behalf of a wretched boy who had, they said, been cruelly maltreated and kicked out of doors by his mother, because his day’s prowl for the purpose of thieving had been unsuccessful. “Why do you not take pity on him yourselves?”—asked the missionary. “Why!”—one of them answered,—“why, if you knew what a thief’s life is as well as we do; you would not train a dog to thieving.” It must have been, thought the missionary, a desperate case which could have so forcibly excited the sympathies of two hardened depredators; and he determined to see into it. He soon found the boy; and his condition was too debased for any description which would not excite loathing. Having made the lad decent, he took him to the model lodging-house in Great Peter Street, benevolently commenced and mainly supported by Lord Kinnaird. The boy was kept there for four months; supported three out of the four solely out of the missionary’s slender private funds.