University of Virginia Library

SCHOOL OF INDUSTRY.

[A School of Industry exists in the city of Aberdeen, in which destitute orphans, and the children of poverty-stricken parents, are gathered together from the haunts of misery and vice, and put in the way of earning an honest livelihood. Here let curiosity, if not kindness, plead for one visit. If they will not heed yon grim old house, and the helpless outcasts there, then are we not accountable in whole for the impiety of wishing that this luckless school had, even at the risk of indwelling cormorants, some share in the beef and boilings attached to other nests. But, alas! no droppings here. Here the cook—honest woman!—may lick her fingers as innocently as if she licked a milestone. Nothing in that meagre building to attract an itchy palm—no elegance therein to reward the soft eye of taste(?)—nor atone for prunella spoiled; so, hapily, neither come. Yet, oh! there is something there will one day speak in words of fire; and when that voice goes forth, happy are they and blessed who have looked in sorrowing kindness on yon shreds of bruised humanity!

One thinks it is written on the door, and speaking through each window—so chilly and forlorn looks our School of Industry! Yet those cold grey granite walls hold an hundred almost sinless hearts in safety. These, but the other day, were gathered from your lanes and entries—from perdition to peace. There they are—look on them; a fountain amidst a desert of souls—a redemption on earth—the rescued—the snatchings from the kingdom of darkness. Yet; there is a treasure therein will yet speak salvation to the godly minds that placed it there. Ye that care but for the hour that passes, look to your safety—ye heedlessly happy! Know ye not that, in turning the human impulses from a wrong to a right direction, ye are adding to your other sweets the sweet of security; and, by lessening the number of thieves, ye may eat your crowning custard in calmness, and lessen the chances of losing your dear “three courses.” Go to yon grim residence of forsaken humanity; look carefully at these sharplike little fellows, and think of your own safety. They came not to your world unbidden, and they will live. Look at them again—fine, rude, raw material there, ready to be manufactured for better, for worse. Think of the thing in an economical posture. In these hundred boys, as they are being trained, you have an equivalent for a thousand patent locks, forty policemen, four goals, two transports, and one hangman. Look on these lads again—then turn to that little box, if you have a sigh and a sixpence about you—God bless you, leave the sixpence at any rate! There comes the monitor, leading in two ragged little strangers—brothers they seem. That look of the elder boy searcher for one's heart, and should find it too, as his lustrous blue eye fills over his only “kin”—his little brother—already gladdening under the strange comfort of shelter. You gave the sixpence? Well, is the monitor's song please you, give the sigh, too, and “Haste ye back.”

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THE MONITOR'S SONG

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