130 
of its members, and has been three years finished. It is four sto¬ 
ries high, built of red sandstone and brick, and cost twenty-two 
thousand dollars. In the basement story is the office and place of 
deposite for bound bibles, which lie on shelves, ready to be sent 
away. The English bibles are sold at one dollar and forty cents, 
and the Spanish, of which a great number are printed and intend¬ 
ed for South America, for one dollar and fifty cents. They also 
sell a great many new testaments separately. 
In the office I saw a great collection of old and new bibles; 
among them I observed Walton’s Polyglot, of which I had al¬ 
ready seen a copy in the library of Harvard College, near 
Boston; an old bible, printed in Switzerland, in the old German 
text; also a new very elegant folio bible, printed at Zurich; one 
in Irish, with the most singular type; a bible half in the Scla¬ 
vonic and half in the Russian language; in showing the latter they 
told me that bible societies were prohibited in Russia; also two 
bibles in Chinese, one printed at Calcutta, and the other at Macao. 
The printing-office and the bookbindery of the society are in the 
second, third, and fourth stories of the building, and are in charge 
of a bookbinder and printer under certain contracts. In the gar¬ 
ret they dry the fresh printed sheets. The English and Spanish 
bibles are stereotyped; they have now in operation twelve or 
thirteen presses; these presses are made of iron and very simple, 
but without a drawing a description of them w ould be unintelligible. 
To every press there is a workman, and a boy whose business it is 
to ink the form. At the bookbindery several women and girls are 
engaged to fold the sheets. These persons work in the third story, 
and in order to separate them entirely from the males, there is a 
separate stair for them to ascend. The large hall where the mem¬ 
bers of the bible society meet, is decorated with two portraits, 
one of Governor Jay, and the other of Dr. Boudinot, first president 
of the society. 
The high school was also built by subscription; in this build¬ 
ing three hundred boys are educated, not gratuitously, as in 
Boston, but by a quarterly payment, according to the class the 
boy is in. In the first class every child has to pay three dollars, 
in the second, five, in the third, seven dollars; the mode of in¬ 
struction is the Lancasterian. In the lower classes are small chil¬ 
dren, some only four years old; they learn spelling, reading, 
writing, and the elements of arithmetic. The boys are generally 
commanded by the sound of a whistle, like sailors; they rise, 
seat themselves, take their slates, and put them away, form 
classes in order to change the different courses of instruction, all 
of which is done at the whistle of the instructors. In the middle 
class education is more extended; the children are instructed in 
grammar, English, Latin, history, geography, physics, and make 
