Mr. Halliday says of it,-- "The whole expense of first purchase, alterations, and furniture, will be about $140,000. Messrs. Peter Cooper, James Lenox, James Brown, Stewart Brown, William H. Aspinwall, E.J. Woolsey, and Mrs. C.L. Spencer, have, unsolicited, each contributed one thousand dollars. Twenty thousand dollars has been appropriated on condition that we obtained a like amount in donations. We expect to have accommodations for nearly five hundred, and the charge for board and washing will be from three dollars and a quarter to three and a half per week. "There will be parlors, reading room and free library, and ample bathing rooms. None of good reputation will be refused admission; no others can become members of the family." It is hoped to open the institution by the first of June. A Young Women's Christian Association was organized in Boston in May, 1866, under the auspices of Mrs. Henry F. Durant. Furnished rooms have been provided at 27, Chauncy Street, where young women can obtain information in regard to employment, boarding-houses, and so on. The applications average one hundred a month; and the association seeks to establish a home, where there will be a restaurant for furnishing meals, at cost, to _young women only_, a free reading and library room, evening schools, rooms for social purposes, and temporary lodging-rooms. This is a most desirable thing to do; but it will not be of permanent benefit, if it puts into a false position any girls capable of self-support. The funds of wise and kind people must start all such movements; but, to be useful, they must be, not only in appearance, but in reality, self-supporting. During the summer of 1866, Octavia Hill, of London, a grand-daughter of the celebrated Dr. Southwood Smith, reports that, after conferring with John Ruskin, she had hired houses for poor tenants. She put them into good order, and kept them in it. She would allow, in her tenants, neither overcrowding nor arrears of rent. She had no middle-men. The experiment was wholly successful, and paid at once five per cent. Mr. Ruskin's lodging-houses, as they are called, are the best that have ever been established in London. They furnish the cheapest and cleanest lodgings for the poor, yet pay a good dividend. They are entirely in the hands of Miss Hill, as Mr. Ruskin himself is more skilful to remedy any social excrescence than patient to bear with it. He forgets, I think, what he once wrote concerning the soul that denies itself an encounter with pain.