interest in the prisons, obtaining from the Prefect of Police leave for Protestant ladies to visit the Protestant prisoners.  Avignon, Lyons, Nismes, Marseilles were visited, and the Protestants of the south of France were much gratified by the meetings held at various places.  With the brothers Courtois of Toulouse they had much agreeable intercourse.  At Montauban they saw the chief “school of the prophets,” where the Protestant pastors are educated, They also went to Switzerland, enjoying the scenery, and also the intercourse with the Duke de Broglie’s family, then at the house of the Baroness de Stael.  Above a hundred persons were invited to meet her, at the house of Colonel Trouchin, near the Lake of Geneva.  Several places were visited, and they returned by Frankfort, Ostend, and Dover.

[Illustration:  Elizabeth Fry]

In February, 1839, she was called to pay a visit to the young Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace.  She went, accompanied by William Allen, Lord Normanby, the Home Secretary, presenting them.  The Queen asked where they had been on the Continent.  She also asked about the Chelsea Refuge for Lads, for which she had lately sent L50.  This gave opportunity for Mrs. Fry thanking Her Majesty for her kindness, and the short interview ended by an assurance that it was their prayer that the blessing of God might rest on the Queen and her relatives.

In the autumn of that year she went to the Continent, with several companions, her brother Samuel Gurney managing the travelling.  They saw Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, and the great prison of Vilvorde; Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Pyrmont, and Hameln, where there were about four hundred prisoners, all heavily chained.  The prisons in Hanover at that time were in deplorable condition, about which, at an interview with the Queen, Mrs. Fry took occasion to speak.

From Hanover they went to Berlin, where a cordial welcome was received.  The Princess William, sister of the late King, was in warm sympathy with Mrs. Fry’s prison-work, and, after the death of Queen Louisa, was a patron and a supporter of every good word and work.  After Frankfort, they went to Duesseldorf, and paid a most interesting visit to Pastor Fliedner, at his training institution for deaconess-nurses, at Kaiserswerth.  Pastor Fliedner had witnessed the good results of Mrs. Fry’s labours at Newgate, and he had established a society called the Rhenish Westphalian Prison Association for similar work in Germany.  Everywhere authority was given to see whatever the travellers desired, so that this Continental journey was very prosperous and satisfactory.  They got back to England in the autumn of 1840.

In 1841 she once more went with her brother Joseph, who was going to some of the northern countries of Europe.  She knew that such a journey would be fatiguing to a frame much enfeebled by illness and a life of continuous exertion, but she still had an earnest desire to work for the good of others, if it seemed the will of her Lord and Master.  “I had very decided encouragement,” she says, “from Friends, particularly the most spiritual among them;” and so, all difficulties being removed, she started, with her brother and two young nieces.