But, not content with this form of service, she visited among her poor neighbors, bent on actively doing good.  She secured a large room belonging to an old house, opposite her own dwelling, and established a school for girls on the Lancasterian pattern there.  Very quickly, under the united efforts of Mrs. Fry, the incumbent of the parish, and a benevolent young lady named Powell, a school of seventy girls was established, and kept in a prosperous condition.  This school was still in working order a few years ago.

Plashet House was a depot of charity.  Calicoes, flannels, jackets, gowns, and pinafores were kept in piles to clothe the naked; drugs suited to domestic practice were stored in a closet, for healing the sick; an amateur soup-kitchen for feeding the hungry was established in a roomy out-building, and this long years before public soup-kitchens became the rage; whilst copies of Testaments were forthcoming on all occasions to teach erring feet the way to Heaven.  But her charity did not stop with these things.

An unsavory locality known as “Irish Row,” about half a mile off, soon attracted her attention.  The slatternliness, suffering, shiftlessness, dirt and raggedness, were inducements to one of her charitable temperament to visit its inhabitants, having their relief and improvement in view; while her appreciation of the warm-heartedness and drollery of the Irish character afforded her genuine pleasure.  Proximity to English life had not refined these Irish; their houses were just as filthy, their windows as patched and obscured with rags, their children just as neglected, and their pigs equally familiar with those children as if they had lived in the wilds of Connemara.  Shillalahs, wakes, potatoes, and poverty were distinguishing characteristics of the locality; whilst its inhabitants were equally ready, with the free and easy volatility of the Irish mind, to raise the jovial song, or utter the cry of distress.

The priest and spiritual director of “Irish Row” found himself almost powerless in the presence of this mass of squalid misery.  That Mrs. Fry was a Quaker and a Protestant, did not matter to him, provided she could assist in raising this debased little colony into something like orderly life and decency.  So he cooperated with her, and with his consent she gave away Bibles and tracts, vaccinated and taught the children, as well as moved among them generally in the character of their good genius.  When delicate and weak, she would take the carriage, filled with blankets and clothes for distribution, down to Irish Row, where the warm-hearted recipients blessed their “Lady bountiful” in terms more voluble and noisy than refined.  Still, however unpromising, the soil bore good fruit.  Homes grew more civilized, men, women, and children more respectable and quiet, while everywhere the impress of a woman’s benevolent labors was apparent.