intelligent young faces, it was difficult to believe in the dark
surroundings of their earlier years. So great was the encouragement
in caring for them, spiritually as well as physically, that Miss
Macpherson could not rest without enlarging the work, and a
dilapidated dwelling at the back of Shoreditch Church "was fitted up
to receive thirty more boys."

In the house first mentioned, besides the matchbox-makers' evening
schools, mothers' meetings and a sewing class for widows were
conducted by Mrs. Merry, and the upper storey was devoted to the
shelter of destitute little girls. But in these, as in all Miss
Macpherson's undertakings, the Lord blessed her so greatly that more
accommodation was required for the constantly increasing numbers.

The needed building was provided in a way that could have been
little conjectured, but the Lord had gone before. Along the great
thoroughfare leading from the Docks to the Great Eastern Railway,
lofty warehouses had taken the place of many unclean, tottering
dwellings formerly seen there. During the fearful visitation of
cholera in 1866 one of these had been secured as a hospital by Miss
Sellon's Sisters of Mercy, and water and gas had been laid-on on
every floor, and every arrangement made for convenience and
cleanliness. When the desolating scourge was withdrawn the house was
closed, and many predicted that it would never be used again. In the
following year Mr. Holland suggested how well it would be to secure
it for a Refuge. The doors had been closed twelve months when Mr. and
Mrs. Merry and three other friends entered the long-deserted
dwelling, and joined in prayer that where death had been seen in all
its terrors, there souls might be born to God, and that the voice of
praise and prayer might be heard within those walls which had once