| Location of Schools. | Daily attendance. | Annual Expenses for the support of schools. |
| Nos. 272 & 274 Mulberry St., | 1,100 | $6,000 |
| Barclay and Church Sts., | 573 | 3,118 |
| New Bowery and James Sts., | 1,400 | 9,000 |
| No. 29 Mott St., | 1,225 | 5,745 |
| Nos. 54 & 56 Pitt St., and 264 Madison St., | 1,620 | 9,500 |
| Nos. 8 & 10 Rutgers St., | 1,050 | 5,000 |
| Leroy St., | 1,000 | 5,500 |
| Nos. 300 & 302 East Eighth St., | 1,600 | 7,000 |
| Nos. 121 & 123, and 135 & 137 Second St., | 1,420 | 5,970 |
| Nos. 8 & 10 Thompson St., | 240 | 2,000 |
| No. 208 East Fourth St., | 1,700 | 6,217 |
| No. 48 Fourth Ave., | 200 | 2,000 |
| Nos. 511 & 513 East 14th St., | 1,250 | 10,000 |
| No. 32 West 18th St., and 111 West 19th St., | 720 | 5,000 |
| No. 118 West 24th St., and 236 West 26th St., | 140 | 1,120 |
| Nos. 333 & 335 West 25th St., | 650 | 3,000 |
| No. 209 West 30th St., and 211 West 31st St., | 400 | 1,600 |
| No. 143 West 31st St., | 400 | 1,000 |
| East 36th St., near Second Ave., | 1,250 | 6,000 |
| No. 309 East 47th St., | 130 | 2,660 |
| East 50th St. and Madison Ave., | 350 | 1,000 |
| East 84th St., near Fourth Ave., | 560 | 4,000 |
| West 131st St., and West 133d St., near 10th Ave., | 320 | 1,000 |
| West 125th St. and Ninth Ave., | 130 | 1,000 |
| 19,428 | $104,430 |
[104] The expenses of the Board of Education of this city for six years have been as follows:
| 1863, | $1,450,000 |
| 1864, | 1,787,000 |
| 1865, | 2,298,508 |
| 1866, | 2,454,327 |
| 1867, | 2,939,348 |
| 1868, | 2,900,000 |
ONE CHRISTMAS EVE IN LA VENDEE.
It was in ‘93—that horrible ‘93, whose very name makes our blood curdle and our hearts beat with a sense of terror and security, as when we gaze on the painted panorama of a battle-field or some scene of crime and danger and despair long since enacted, but brought vividly before us by the graphic power of eloquence or art. The words have a spell in them that fascinates us, and defies us to pass on without pausing to look upon the memories they evoke. Well, it is of this tragic ‘93 that I am going to speak. But not to describe its horrors. It only makes the frame of my story, a most veracious story, and full of the spirit of that wonderful epoch, where we see all that was noble and loveliest in humanity shine forth by the side of its most criminal and appalling aberrations.
It was Christmas eve fourscore years ago. The fertile soil of La Vendée, red-dyed by streams of patriot blood, was hidden under a deep quilt of snow. All the landscape slept as in a death-sleep under a pure white pall. Hills and plains were garmented in white. The snow had fallen heavily during the night, and its untrodden purity was as smooth and uniform as the blue of the winter sky, that looked down upon it and grew pale. The cottages that dotted the fair expanse hardly broke its uniformity, for they too were liveried in white, the roof thick thatched with snow, and the whitewashed walls only a degree less dazzling than the brightness of the ground. The hedges that divide the fields in La Vendée as in England were filled and covered with snow, and the hoar-frost like a fairy lace-work glittered and shone on the soft, unblemished surface, and the trees with rolls of snow resting on their bare gaunt arms held up clusters of icicles that sparkled like crystals in the tepid December sun.
The village of Chamtocé lay in this white landscape; and in the middle of the village stood the church, and close by the church the presbytery.
On the road that led from St. Florent to Chamtocé a young, lithe figure was crushing the crisp white carpet with a long, elastic step. His face was concealed, the upper part of it by a cap drawn low over his forehead, and the lower part by a woollen scarf wound round his throat, swallowing up the chin and nose in its capacious folds. The weather was not cold enough to need this ostentatious display of cache-nez; true, la nappe blanche de la Noël (white cloth of Christmas), as the peasants call it, was spread, but there was not a breath of wind, and it was not freezing. It had frozen during the night just enough to sprinkle the hoar-frost abroad and hang a thin fringe of glass from the roofs of the houses and deck the trees with icicles, but this was not what the Vendéans called freezing. The Loire pursued its journey majestically to the sea unchecked by the icy hand of the black frost, the cruel black frost, that had but to blow with its bleak breath for one night on the strong deep stream to paralyze its waters and chill their moaning into icy dumbness. So, the cold was not bitter. The traveller knew it, too, for on coming to a point of the road where it turned abruptly, and disclosed the church with its slim, gray belfry, and, on the rising ground beyond it, a windmill, still as spectre suspended midway between the white earth and the pale sky, he looked cautiously up and down the road, assured himself there was no one in sight, and then, raising his beaver cap, stood bare-headed in the attitude of a man saluting some object of love and veneration.
“Nearly four years since I knelt under the shadow of thy walls, and now I have come home, and thou dost greet me with the same unchanged, unchanging welcome!”