iths formed part
of the staff of the great establishment.

Gradually every variety of institution that could furnish active
practice to the deaconesses took its place here, and the whole might be
denominated a great normal training-school for Christian women. The
refuge for discharged female convicts, which was the starting-point of
the movement, still continued its good work during all these years. The
last report[32] states that nine hundred and nineteen women of different
ages and different degrees of wrong-doing have been its inmates. Parents
send insubordinate girls; societies forward those who profess penitence;
magistrates sentence degraded creatures often too late for any
reasonable hope to reform them. The old experience of the refuge is
repeated in this last report: one third are saved, one third are
irredeemable, and the judgment as to the remaining third, doubtful.
There were two buildings erected during the later years of Fliedner's
life in which he took great interest. One of these was a cottage among
the neighboring hills, where deaconesses who had become exhausted by
long days in the sick-room, or whose health was suffering from
over-toil, could retire for a few weeks of mountain air and quiet rest
during the summer months. This pleasant retreat was well named Salem.
Soon afterward was laid the corner-stone of the second building,
regarded with peculiar favor not only by the good pastor, but by all
friends of the institution. This was the "Feierabend Haus," the House of
Evening Rest, where, somewhat apart from the busy activity of the great
household, those deaconesses whose best strength had been given to
faithful labor in the service could pass the evening hours of life in
quiet waiting for the last great change, while using the experience they
had gathered and the strength still remaining in behalf of the cause
they had faithfully served.

Such are the main features of the great establishment that year by year
grew up in this village on the Rhine. But from this as a center had
gradually branched off manifold lines of service, and many
daughter-houses both in Germany and foreign lands. It was only a year
and a half after the home was opened that the first appointment of
deaconesses to work outside of Kaiserswerth was made.

This was an important victory for the new institution. It took place
January 21, 1838, on Fliedner's birthday, when he and his wife escorted
two of the sisters to Elberfeld, wher