Leave us for a while, good reader, taking supper in a pleasant room, with the sweet breath of flowers stealing at the window, the rustle of waving trees outside, and pleasant sounds of song and laughter in the distance. Go back to the busy beautiful, wicked city, pierce it showy surface, and descend into the depths where hundreds upon hundreds of little ones are dwelling in places of misery and vice.
     You will find very bad children there. Such hardened little hearts! You will find children made by your Maker, who have been taught to steal and lie and fight and curse, whose currents all are setting prisonward who know not the sweetness of home, the love of kindred, nor the holiness of God -- poor, dreadful little creatures seething in viciousness, favored when some expression of their individuality, recognized as crime, puts the law on their track to take them away, anywhere.
     There is another class of little New Yorkers -- it would be a pity if your sweet little girl in a white frock and pretty sash knew anything about them -- who are not quite so bad as the worst children, but who are taking in wrong impulses at every pore; who now are known only to be lazy, disobedient, given to truancy and disorderly ways; children who in their tender years strike cruel blows, crippling the energies or breaking the hearts of honest hard-working parents.
     Still another and third grade of little one is found in the midst of these. You will know them by their pitiful faces, by their neglected, suffering little bodies, or by appalling ways and habits that are imitative merely, not vicious. Their young lips may utter oaths -- but it will be just as simply as the baby in your home might repeat snatches of Mother Goose. They laugh at a street fight as the other laughs at "This little pig went to market."
     These are the partially unpolluted children of lazy drunken, degraded mothers, or of desolate, neglectful fathers; or, it may be of honest parents forced by destitution to live among the vicious and depraved. When we think of the over-crowded tenement-houses of the city, where from seventy to one hundred and forty, and even as many as hundred and eighty human beings have been found living under the same room, on a surface are of 20 by 50 feet, with only four or five stories above the cellar, we may well shudder at the chances of the little ones who live there.
     Twenty years ago, if any city child, whether vile or simply neglected, committed a legal offense, the only place except a prison to which the courts could send it was to the institution popularly known as the House of Refuge. This, virtually, was a penal institution, though its conduct embraced the disciplining and training of its inmates. It aimed them, as it does to-day, to be truly a refuge from vice. Good men were interested in its success, and it was recognized as being just what was needed.. It had already been in existence twenty-seven years, and during that time had received over five thousand young offenders -- a big number until you divide it by twenty-seven and count the thousands outside who needed to be snatched from their dreadful surroundings. The necessity of additional means of breaking up the juvenile vice and crime of the city was keenly felt by the authorities as well as by all thoughtful philanthropists. Not only vicious, but homeless, deserted, and truant children, wandering about the vilest districts of the town, needed to be wisely sheltered and trained. Especially was it deemed important to provide a reformatory home for disobedient children voluntarily surrendered by parents unable to control them.
     Out of the wants and considerations grew the New York Juvenile Asylum, in the year of our Lord 1851.
     The institution proposed to receive all destitute or vagrant children between the ages of five and fourteen, legally committed to is charge by the courts, or by parents or guardians, to rescue them from the consequences of their evil surrounding and train them to ways of goodness and usefulness. They were to be retained until, in the opinion of the managers, their condition warranted their being released on application of friends, indentured to suitable employers or cosigned to homes of Christian familles in the country. Even afterward, the institution would follow up its young charges, by correspondence and personal visitation, until right habits were established and the children "saved from becoming burthens to themselves and a curse to others." Twenty-four well-known benevolent merchants of this city obtained their charter as a body corporate under the title of "The New York Juvenile Asylum." The extensive building on 175th street and a House of Reception on 13th street were erected by voluntary subscription from citizens and an equal appropriation for the city supervisors. Then the Society set to work, the annual expenses being met equally by private donors and the city government.
     Thus sprang to life one of New York's noblest institutions. It is nineteen summers old to-day. Dr. Brooks has been its superintendent and physician for the twelve years.
     We are rising from the supper table when our host say:--
     "Will you come into the chapel? The children are about to begin their evening exercises."
     Without claiming remarkable susceptibility, I must say I have a dread of seeing child-paupers. The feeling was especially strong now, as Theophilus whispered while passing through the hall -- "You mustn't expect to find little saints, you know."
     Little saints indeed! How could they be little saints? I gave him a look, and hurried in as the Doctor opened the door leading from the hall into the chapel. It was a very large room, with broad, high windows on each side, through which the evening sun shone brightly, lighting up rows upon rows of little square desks.
     There sat the children! more than five hundred of them. The drift of the Five Points and all the dirtiest streets, docks, and alleys of the city! Five hundred little truants, thieves, vagabonds, and beggars!
     Who said so? Not Theophilus. He was gazing at them with shining eyes. Not the Doctor. He was quietly standing on the platform. It must have come through the windows, from New York.
     As for myself, I was listening and looking. The little creatures, one and all, were singing their evening hymn. Somehow, I could not see their faces on account of the music, and I couldn't hear the music on account of their faces. Committees may not feel like crying on such occasions; but every one is not a committee.
     As a general thing, melodeons are hardly to be commended. With their gallons of grandeur "sharpened to a pint," they are apt to confound harmony and small measure in a peculiarly exasperating way. But the melodeon that accompanied these children behaved well. It put on no airs, and allowed the little ones to attend to the vox humana.
     The performer, a young girl, was nearly hidden from where we sat upon the raised platform. As her head bent over the keys, she seemed to be whispering coaxingly -- "Now don't try to do anything but breathe."
     So it breathed a soft, rich half-sighing accompaniment while the childish voices sang:
       "On the sweet Eden shore, so peaceful and bright,
       The spirits made a perfect are dwelling in light:
       Their white wings are wafting them gently along
       Through the beautiful regions of glory and song."
     After this, a little evening speech from the Doctor -- just a few simple, fatherly words. Then with clasped hands and closed eyes, the children said the Lord's Prayer in concert, and then stood up in their places, and looked straight at the Doctor.
     "Good night!" said he cheerily.
     "Good night, sir!" they answered as heartily, and in perfect order quietly filed out of their places, and so went off to bed.
     It was settled that we should stay all night and "go through" the institution the next day.