Two well-known gentlemen of our city headed the subscription with $1,000 each; the trustees came forward liberally, and the two or three who have done so much for this charity took on themselves the disagreeable task of soliciting funds, so that in two months we had some $27,000 subscribed, with which we both secured an excellent building in St. Mark's Place, and adapted it for our purposes. Our effort is in this to make the house more attractive and tasteful than such places usually are; and various ladies have co-operated with us, to exert a more profound and renovating influence on these girls. TRAINING-SCHOOL FOR SERVANTS. We have already engrafted on this Lodging-house a School to train ordinary house-servants; to teach plain cooking, waiting, the care of bedrooms, and good laundry-work. Nothing is more needed among this class, or by the public generally, than such a "Training-school." Of the statistics of the Lodging-house, Mrs. Trott writes as follows:-- "Ten thousand two hundred and twenty-five lodgers. What an army would the registered names make, since a forlorn, wretched child of thirteen years, from the old Trinity station-house, headed the lists in 1861! "Among this number there are many cozily sitting by their own hearth-stones; others are filling positions of usefulness and trust in families and stores; some have been adopted in distant towns, where they fill a daughter's place; and some have gone to return no more. A large number we cannot trace. "During this period, three thousand one hundred and one have found employment, and gone to situations, or returned to friends. "Fifteen thousand four hundred and twenty-nine garments have been cut and made, and distributed among the poor, or used as outfits in sending companies West." CHAPTER XXVI. THE NINETEENTH STREET GANG OF RUFFIANS. A MORAL "DISINFECTANT." During the summer of 1865, I was present in London as a delegate to the International Reformatory Convention, and had the opportunity, for the second or third time, to investigate thoroughly the preventive and reformatory institutions of Great Britain. On my return I found that the President of our Board, of whom I have already spoken, had taken a lease of a building in a notorious quarter. His idea was that some of my observations in England might be utilized here and tested in a preventive institution. The quarter was well known to me. It had been the home and school of the murderous gang of boys and young men known as "THE NINETEENTH STREET GANG." It happens that the beginnings and the process of growth of this society of young criminals were thoroughly known by me at the time, and, as one case of this kind illustrates hundreds going on now, I will describe it in detail:--