To-morrow morning take your stand at Fulton or Catharine ferry, and you shall see much such another procession go shivering by. The next day station yourself somewhere on the west side, say in Canal street, a few blocks from Broadway; here it is again. If Asmodeus-like, you could hover in the air above the roofs of the town, and look down upon its myriad streets at this hour, you would see such processions in every quarter of the metropolis. The spectacle would help you to form some idea of the vastness of the theme now on our hands.

Let us define the poor girls as those who are forced to earn whatever food they eat, whatever clothing they wear, by hard toil; girls who do not receive one cent, one crumb, from the dead, helpless, or recreant parents who brought them into the world. It is, of course, impossible to give their number accurately; but there is a result attainable by persistent observation, day by day and week by week, at all hours, and in all sorts of places, which is quite as reliable and satisfactory as any that is obtainable through blundering census-takers; and I know this army of poor girls to be one of great magnitude. The sewing girls alone I have heard estimated at thirty thousand, by one whose life is in every day contact with them, and has been for years. This is but a single class among the poor girls, reflect. The estimate may be deemed an exaggerated one. Then we will disarm criticism by taking it at half its word. If, accordingly, we say thirty thousand for the whole—for all classes—it is still a vague figure…. Few persons ever saw thirty thousand people gathered together. But we all comprehend distances. If this army of poor girls were to form in a procession together, it would be more than ten miles long.

THE SEWING GIRLS.

There are two classes of sewing girls in New York. Those who work at home, and those who go out to work at places provided by their employers. Those who work at home are comparatively few. They stay there not from choice, but from necessity. Bodily deformity, or infirmity, or sickness, or invalid parents, or relatives, whom they are unable to leave, keeps them there.

The writer in Putnam, to whose deeply interesting statement we refer the reader for further information on this point, found a poor girl of this class, who was kept at home by the sickness of her consumptive father, living and working in a miserable tenement house in the upper part of Mulberry street. After a brief conversation with her, he asked:

'What rent do you pay for this room, Mary?'

'Four dollars a month, sir.'

"That," he continues, "is little more than thirteen cents a day, you will observe."

'What do you get for making such a shirt as that?'

'Six cents, sir.'