This Institution is situated at No. 33 Houston street, adjoining and controlled by the Convent of the Sisters of Mercy. The society was incorporated in 1848, under the general act of May 12th of that year, and the three-story brick building corner of Houston and Mulberry streets purchased at a cost of $30,000. This is the Convent, or home of the Sisters of Mercy. The same year the edifice known as the Institution of Mercy, a plain four-story brick, forty feet by seventy-two, was begun, on lots adjoining the purchased building, and sufficiently completed to receive inmates in November, 1849. The Sisters of Mercy are a religious order of Roman Catholics, founded by Catharine McAuly¹ a lady of fortune of Dublin, in 1827, and the order was approved by Pope Gregory XVI. in 1835, and confirmed in 1841. The order has in view the visitation of the sick and prisoners, the instruction of poor girls, and the protection of virtuous women in distress. The first community in the United States was established in Pittsburg in 1843, but none entered New York until 1846, when Archbishop Hughes invited them to come from Ireland and establish an institution. The Sisters are subject to the bishops, but have no general superior, each community being independent of the rest of the order. The Sisters are divided into two orders: choir sisters, who are employed about the ordinary objects of the order; and lay sisters, who attend to the domestic avocations of the convent, etc. Candidates for admission into the order undergo a "postulancy" of six months; they then receive the white veil and enter the novitiate, which lasts two years, being permitted at any time to return to the world before the vows are finally taken. The presiding mind in each community is the Mother Superior. Agnes O'Conner was the first in New York, and the present one is the fourth. The community at present numbers 49,12 of whom are at the Industrial Home at Eighty-first street. The Sisters teach a select school of day scholars at the Convent, and another in Fifty-fourth street for their own support, so as not to be an expense to their Institution.

The Sisters are a corporate body, holding their own property, and elect annually their board of eight trustees from their own number. Archbishop Hughes ordered each Catholic pastor in New York to collect $500 to assist them in founding their Institution in 1488, and a number of private donations were also received. The Roman Catholic churches in the city continued for several years to take collections for this cause, but this is no longer considered necessary. Virtuousgirls of any age, out of employment, are received into the Institution, and remain a longer or shorter period, according to circumstances. Machine and hand sewing, embroidery, and laundry work, form the chief employment of the inmates. Many young females from other countries, just landing on our shores, with little or no means, have been picked up by this society and raised to industry and respectability, who would otherwise have soon sunken into pits of infamy. Since the opening of the Institution, over eleven thousand girls have been admitted, and the Sisters have found places of employment for about twenty thousand. This last number includes some from the House of Protection at West Farms, and many who have not been received into either institution. The earnings of the girls go toward the support of the Institution, deficiencies being provided for by private and public donations, and by fairs. The Institution has accommodations for about seventy-five, though in times of great destitution one hundred and twenty have been crowded into it.

The Sisters do also a vast amount of outside visiting every year. Clad in their sable habit, they glide like shadows through the crowded streets, finding their way to abodes of sickness and poverty in garrets and cellars. They search the prisons of this and of neighboring cities, "prepare" the Catholic culprit for the scaffold, administer as far as means will permit to the wants of the destitute, and prepare for the sacraments ten times more children than the same number of priests. However much one may criticise their work, or pity their delusions, they are certainly abundant in self-sacrifices, untiring in toil, and rank among the best of their denomination. They are well informed, especially in matters of their own church, polite in their attentions to literary visitors, and if disrobed of the habit of the order, and dressed for the drawing-room, a few of them would be pronounced handsome.

For several years past the Sisters have been engaged in the erection of a building for an "Industrial School for the Destitute Children of Soldiers and Others." This was finally completed and occupied in the autumn of 1869. It stands on a block of ground contributed by the authorities, bounded by Madison and Fourth avenues, Eighty-first and Eighty-second streets. It is situated on high ground, is an imposing four story-and-attic structure, in the Gothic order, with stone copings, and has accommodations for five hundred children. It has a front of one hundred and sixty feet, a depth of sixty, and a rear extension for the engine which heats the building, for wash-room, laundry, and other conveniences. It cost, with its furniture, $180,000, $105,000 of which were contributed by the State, always liberal to prodigality to the Institutions of Roman Catholics. It had at our visit to it, February 22d, 1870, 80 children. The children of soldiers are to be taken free; as are all others twelve years of age, some pay or clothing being required with those received at an earlier age.

¹Name should be spelled McAuley