ETH FRY.

[Illustration: My attached and obliged friend Elizabeth Fry]

When a woman of beauty, great wealth, and the highest social position,
devotes her life to the lifting of the lowly and the criminal, and
preaches the Gospel from the north of Scotland to the south of France,
it is not strange that the world admires, and that books are written
in praise of her. Unselfishness makes a rare and radiant life, and
this was the crowning beauty of the life of Elizabeth Fry.

Born in Norwich, England, May 21, 1780, Elizabeth was the third
daughter of Mr. John Gurney, a wealthy London merchant. Mrs. Gurney,
the mother, a descendant of the Barclays of Ury, was a woman of much
personal beauty, singularly intellectual for those times, making her
home a place where literary and scientific people loved to gather.

Elizabeth wellnigh idolized her mother, and used often to cry after
going to bed, lest death should take away the precious parent. In the
daytime, when the mother, not very robust, would sometimes lie down
to rest, the child would creep to the bedside and watch tenderly and
anxiously, to see if she were breathing. Well might Mrs. Gurney say,

"My dove-like Betsy scarcely ever offends, and is, in every
sense of the word, truly engaging."

Mrs. Fry wrote years afterward: "My mother was most dear to me, and
the walks she took with me in the old-fashioned garden are as fresh
with me as if only just passed, and her telling me about Adam and Eve
being driven out of Paradise. I always considered it must be just
like our garden.... I remember with pleasure my mother's beds of wild
flowers, which, with delight, I used as a child to attend with her; it
gave me that pleasure in observing their beauties and varieties that,
though I never have had time to become a botanist, few can imagine, in
my many journeys, how I have been pleased and refreshed by observing
and enjoying the wild flowers on my way."

The home, Earlham Hall, was one of much beauty and elegance, a seat of
the Bacon family. The large house stood in the centre of a well-wooded
park, the river Wensum flowing through it. On the south front of the
house was a large lawn, flanked by great trees, underneath which wild
flowers grew in profusion. The views about the house were so artistic
that artists often came there to sketch.

In this restful and happy home, after a brief illness, Mrs. Gurney
died in early womanhood, leaving eleven children, all young, th