something or nothing, as He may see best for us."

After eleven years the Fry family moved to a beautiful home in the
country at Plashet. Changes had come in those eleven years. The father
had died; one sister had married Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, and she
herself had been made a "minister" by the Society of Friends. While
her hands were very full with the care of her seven children, she had
yet found time to do much outside Christian work.

Naturally shrinking, she says, "I find it an awful thing to rise
amongst a large assembly, and, unless much covered with love and
power, hardly know how to venture." But she seemed always to be
"covered with love and power," for she prayed much and studied her
Bible closely, and her preaching seemed to melt alike crowned heads
and criminals in chains.

Opposite the Plashet House, with its great trees and flowers, was a
dilapidated building occupied by an aged man and his sister. They had
once been well-to-do, but were now very poor, earning a pittance by
selling rabbits. The sister, shy and sorrowful from their reduced
circumstances, was nearly inaccessible, but Mrs. Fry won her way to
her heart. Then she asked how they would like to have a girls' school
in a big room attached to the building. They consented, and soon
seventy poor girls were in attendance.

"She had," says a friend, "the gentlest touch with children. She would
win their hearts, if they had never seen her before, almost at the
first glance, and by the first sound of her musical voice."

Then the young wife, now thirty-one, established a depot of calicoes
and flannels for the poor, with a room full of drugs, and another
department where good soup was prepared all through the hard winters.
She would go into the "Irish Colony," taking her two older daughters
with her, that they might learn the sweetness of benevolence,
"threading her way through children and pigs, up broken staircases,
and by narrow passages; then she would listen to their tales of want
and woe."

Now she would find a young mother dead, with a paper cross pinned upon
her breast; now she visited a Gypsy camp to care for a sick child, and
give them Bibles. Each year when the camp returned to Plashet, their
chief pleasure was the visits of the lovely Quaker. Blessings on thee,
beautiful Elizabeth Fry!

She now began to assist in the public meetings near London, but with
some hesitation, as it took her from home; but after an absence of two
weeks, s