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thing to do; and as the trial went on, evidently not a few, moved by the simplicity and courage of the Maid's answers, would gladly have saved her. Even Cauchon himself could not have hated her except politically, as the cause of his having been exiled from his diocese. Behind him lay a lost diocese, before him (by English promise) a possible archbishopric. The triumph of Jeanne had lost him one; her condemnation might gain. him the other. She was but an unavoidable step in the ladder he had set himself to climb. What there had been in the lives of these men before, which made it possible for them to be so blinded, and to act as they did, we know not; what causes and what excuses lay hidden deep in their former lives; or whether, indeed, in all cases, the worst crimes

are those committed from passions exceptionally fierce, or from the small self-interests so terribly ordinary.

One only is the Judge of men, the Son of Man, who "knoweth what is in man yet loves the world.

We may not judge, lest we condemn the innocent; yet, on the other hand, we are not to excuse, lest we call evil good.

Something in himself had made it possible for the Bishop of Beauvais to blind and steel his heart during those four months to the unveiling of as pure and loving a soul as ever shone before men, and to torture one of the Father's beloved children, one of the Lord Christ's anointed ones, to death.

God knows what that something was, and I suppose, now, he knows himself.

ONE

MRS. FRY.

BY MRS. FRANCIS G. FAITHFULL.

NE winter's day in the year 1813, the gates of Newgate grated on their hinges to admit not a scowling or dejected prisoner, but a tall, slender Quaker woman, verging on middle age.

Within, the governor met her. He himself, he said, hardly dare venture unguarded where she meant to go. She still wished to do her errand; and when he urged her at least to leave her purse and watch in safe keeping, she replied calmly, "I thank thee, I am not afraid. I don't think I shall lose anything," and went quietly on.

Passing along many dark stone passages, she entered a narrow and filthy yard, in which were crowded more than three hundred women and children, clothed in rags or scarcely clothed at all, uttering shrill cries, and clamorously demanding money wherewith to buy gin.

She had been told of this. She knew that in this yard, and in the two adjoining wards and cells, might be found herded together, under the charge of one gaoler and his son, all the women imprisoned in Newgate, tried and untried, hardened offenders and young girls committed for their first petty theft. Here they lived and cooked by day, here they slept by night on the bare ground, watched from above (so lawless were they) by sentinels posted on the prison leads.

As she entered they stared at her in amazement. She had come, she said, wishing to serve them. She saw that they were illclothed, and thought she might do some

| thing for their comfort. The sweet face looking at them so compassionately, the gentle. voice speaking such friendly words moved these reckless creatures strangely. When she was departing they thronged round her. "You will never come again," they exclaimed sadly.

"I will come again," she promised, and she kept her word.

But before we tell how well she kept it, we will look back a little to the young days of this brave woman, and see how she had been led to spend her life in doing good.

She came of an ancient stock. One of her forefathers had fought with Prince Edward in the Holy Land, and another with the Black Prince at Crecy. Later on the martial spirit seems to have died out of the race, for when George Fox founded the Society of Friends, a Gurney, of Keswick, in Norfolk, at once joined it. A descendant of his married Catherine Bell, the daughter of a London merchant, and great-grand-daughter of Robert Barclay, the friend of Fox and Penn, and of this marriage Elizabeth Gurney was the third daughter.

She was born in 1780, and her infancy was passed between an old house in Norwich and the neighbouring village of Brameston, to which her parents always took their children for the summer months. Forty years later she tenderly recalled those early days and the mother who had first taught her to love God and His works.

"I remember the solemn feelings I had

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brilliant Norwich society, and to enjoy many pastimes usually forbidden to Friends. In the long summer days they sketched and read and talked beside the river or under the old trees in the park. Sometimes they rode and walked about the country, coming home laden with wild flowers and other field spoils, and in the evenings they sang and danced in the large ante-room.

As a child Elizabeth had been exceedingly timid and reserved, "languid in body and mind," but she developed into a bright, graceful girl; and, though somewhat ignorant, thanks to her early dislike to lessons, her animation, gentleness, and humour made her very winning. She knew this. She liked to see her fair skin and soft flaxen hair set off to advantage, and could be excited about a military band, or the Duke of Gloucester's presence at a ball. She says of herself, "I was flirting, idle, rather proud and vain, till I was seventeen."

At that age she made two friends-one, a Roman Catholic gentleman, who, without any attempt at proselytising, read and talked much with her and her sisters about religion; the other, a remarkable woman, Mrs. Schimmelpenninck. Their influence soon told upon her. "I am like a ship put to sea without a pilot." "My mind is in a state of fermentation. I believe I am going to be religious." | These entries in her diary show how the current was already setting.

dances; and, strange contrast, listened often to William Savory's preaching. When she returned to Earlham her mind was made up. Hitherto she had constantly dreamt (probably from some recollection of her childish terror in bathing) that she was washed away by the sea. Now she dreamt again that the sea came to wash her away, but she was beyond its reach.

There was no touch of fanaticism in her new-found faith. She visited the sick poor and taught the little children on her father's estate, but she hesitated long before she could even resolve to vex her brothers and sisters by foregoing dancing and singing. She had, indeed, a deeply-rooted fear of displeasing those she loved, which made her give up more than she should. By degrees, however, she conquered this fear, as she had conquered her nervous dread of darkness. Her dress was gradually modified; her scarlet riding-habit and jewelry laid aside, and sober-coloured plainly-made gowns led the way to the cap and kerchief, which showed, as did the "Thou" she now adopted, that she had cast in her lot wholly with the Friends.

She was soon to be bound to them still more closely. When Joseph Fry asked her to become his wife, she doubted lest "marriage might not too much absorb her interests and affections," and withhold her from some such higher mission as William Savory had Soon afterwards William Savory, an an foreshadowed. Perhaps it might have been American Friend, preached at the Norwich better for her peace if she had chosen a single meeting-house. One of Elizabeth's sisters life, but her scruples were overcome, and describes the effect. "We seven sisters sat when she was only nineteen she exchanged as usual in a row under the gallery at meet- her happy Earlham home for a quiet house ing. I sat by Betsy. She was generally rather adjoining her husband's place of business in restless at meetings. William Savory began St. Mildred's Court. St. Mildred's Court. His kinsfolk were all to preach. His voice and manner were "plain, consistent Friends," and sometimes, arresting, and we all liked the sound. Her in the guests gathered together under her attention became fixed. At last I saw her At last I saw her City roof, she felt, almost painfully, the conbegin to weep, and she became a good deal trast between the blithe Gurney sisterhood, so agitated. The next morning William Savory dear to her, and the grave women in camlet came and preached to our dear sister after gowns and black silk hoods with whom she breakfast, prophesying of the high and im- claimed religious fellowship. portant calling she would be led into. From that day her love of pleasure and of the world seemed gone."

It was not wholly gone, but a mental struggle had begun which, with a temperament like hers, could have but one end. "To-day I have felt that there is a God," is her own solemn record of the change within her.

She went to stay in London, chatted with Amelia Opie, Peter Pindar, and many notable people; was taken to plays, operas, and

Children came fast; and, ardently as she loved them, their ailments and waywardness troubled her deeply. Her delicate health made even her household duties trying to her, but she nevertheless did her full part in tending her widowed father-in-law, and often found her way into the poor courts and alleys round St. Mildred's.

Still it was not the life that her young enthusiasm had pictured. Eight years after her marriage she wrote, "Instead of being, as I had hoped, a useful instrument in the

Church Militant, here I am, a careworn wife love alive among the scattered members of and mother, outwardly nearly devoted to the | their Society. She held, indeed, strongly things of this life.”

Her father-in-law's death brought about a migration from St. Mildred's Court to Plashet House, in Essex; and, after being so long caged in London, she revelled in the country liberty in which she had been born and bred. Armed with baskets and trowels, she and her little children would sally forth into the woods and fields to root up primroses and anemones for the Plashet shrubberies. She had a girls' school opposite her gates, and doled out flannel, soup, and drugs to the poor folk. She was skilful, too, in vaccination, and her lancet kept small-pox well at bay. In fact, "Madam Fry" was to be seen everywhere: in the village shops, among the gipsies who yearly pitched their tents in the green lanes; and, oftenest of all perhaps, in one or other of a group of tumble-down cottages, before the doors of which wild Irish children and pigs dabbled together in the mud.

But she was now nearing the work to which she had long looked with desire and yet dread. As she stood among the mourners gathered to lay her father in the grave, she suddenly broke forth into fervent words of prayer and praise. They were spoken almost against her will, but "a quiet calm" followed. Her gift was at once recognised. Yet she held back tremblingly from the public ministry, on which, according to Quaker tenets, she was bound to enter, till her strong impulse, or, as she believed, a spiritual prompting, once more mastered her. "Again on Fourth day I have dared to open my mouth in public."

Even when she had been preaching for a year she avowed, "My very frequent speaking in meeting is very awful to me;" and to the and to the end of her life it was always with an effort that she uttered those petitions and appeals the influence of which never ceased to be a wonder to herself. "How marvellous is the power which appears to overshadow me in the ministry!" "And it was marvellous. One who heard her in those early days declared that he could never forget her praying, or think of it without emotion. And certainly if the tears she could draw, not only from unhappy women but from hardy sailors and stern gaolers, were any test of eloquence, hers could not be denied.

It was more than public preaching in the Friends' meeting-house at Plaistow which she had to face. She felt constrained to take She felt constrained to take part in those missionary journeys by which the Friends try to keep Christian unity and

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that a woman's highest duties generally lay at home, but she believed that some few were marked out by special gifts for special service, and that of those few she was one.

She must have needed some such strong conviction to steel her, sensitive as she was, against the censures of many, and the forebodings of her own anxious nature, when she left her home sometimes for months. "My own poor health, and my little ones these things made those long wanderings not light undertaking.

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The manifold duties of a careful housemother, added to those of a missionary preacher, were more than any one could well discharge. "I feel," she says, "as if I spent my strength beyond what I have, and cannot satisfy the calls of friendship or other claims.' And though naturally social, she sighs over the many guests coming and going, and longs for rest and quiet with her husband and children. There is throughout her diary at this time a strain of depression, weariness, and almost fretfulness, which tells of overtaxed nerves.

Yet her home was well ordered, and though her rule was perhaps too easy, there was no lack of careful supervision. Indeed, she herself sometimes feared that her thoughts ran too much on "kitchens and laundries." A kind and considerate mistress, she felt, as all mistresses do not, that servants should be treated "justly and forbearingly, remembering their many disadvantages." To her children her tenderness was unbounded. She shared their joys, nursed them devotedly in sickness, and held their wills in check by a mild authority peculiarly her own. And when one of them, a girl of five years old, died suddenly, she was able as she hung over the bed to give thanks that the little one could never suffer more, even though she endured "inexpressible pangs" at her own loss, and for long afterwards had the child constantly in her mind.

At

Such was Elizabeth Fry when she first went among the Newgate prisoners. once she took in their more crying needs, and though for a while she could not see her way to helping them, pressed on all sides as she was, yet she did not forget, and there came a day when she who as a girl had almost feared her shadow was at her own wish locked up alone for hours with these desperate women. She had a question to ask them-Would they like to have a school in there for the little children wailing and

quarrelling at their feet? They eagerly assented. Even they were shocked at the oaths and curses that fell from their babies' lips. She bade them choose a teacher from among themselves, and their choice presently fell on a girl better educated than her fellows, who was under sentence for watch-stealing. How to find a school-room? The governor applauded her purpose, but shook his head when she asked if there were no available room. She got his leave to search for herself, and lighting on an empty cell decided that it would do.

The very next day she opened her school. Many of the women urgently entreated to be among the scholars. This could not be, but when she saw how well it prospered, and the mothers' interest in it, another plan came into her head. Why should they not be brought, these wretched mothers, to love something better than the gambling, begging, fortune-telling, and drinking in which their days were spent? She had friends willing to aid, and she would see what could be done. She was told that the women would rebel; that if work were given them it would be stolen. She only asked to be allowed to try. "Let the women be assembled in your presence," she said to the governor and sheriffs; "and if they will not consent to the strict observance of our rules let the subject be dropped."

About seventy of them were accordingly brought together. Mrs. Fry explained to them that she and her friends did not mean to command while they blindly obeyed. All must work together. And then she read to them the rules that had been framed. Very stringent those rules were, forbidding much in which they took delight, and enforcing a discipline which must prove galling to their ungoverned tempers. Yet at each pause every hand was held up in approval.

chapter in the Bible was read, a few words spoken, and then followed a silence during which many of the women might be seen weeping. They soon sewed and knitted well, and their earnings helped to clothe them, and sometimes to provide them food and lodging when they left the prison. The rules were kept surprisingly; no work was ever stolen, and a guinea dropped by a visitor was carried to the matron by the prisoner who found it. Once it was discovered that some gambling was going on again. Mrs. Fry called the women together, and telling them gently how bad it was for them, asked all who had cards to bring them to her. Presently in came one, then a second, and a third, till five dirty packs had been put into her hands. At another time, certain women who had made a disturbance in the prison wrote assuring her with touching earnestness of their deep penitence.

And

These were but two proofs out of many of the spell she had cast over them. how had she done it? A few words she once uttered give us some clue. "I never ask their crimes, for we have all come short," was her quiet reproof to some one curious about a prisoner's offence.

Yet along with her exceeding charity and tender fellow-feeling for them, there went a remarkable power of reading their characters. If her love and pity-love such as they had never dreamt of, or remembered only in some far-off days-won those impulsive hearts, her clear judgment, her wise foresight taught her how to turn her conquest to account, how to save them from themselves. They felt this, and sometimes, when their day of release came, they might be heard pleading to be kept in prison, guarded from the old comrades waiting for them at the gates, till she could send them to the refuge now provided for them. From this refuge many, still sheltered by her care, passed again into the world and filled a place there worthily. One who for years had been a drunkard and a forger learnt to support herself and several children by her own industry; another ful

returned to the prison, and those who did re-entered it with bitter shame.

Still there were doubters. Approval, it was said, was one thing, obedience another. A few weeks' trial silenced all doubts. The governor owned that he hardly recognised this part of the prison. The fierce, unwashed women who a while back had been fighting for the fore-filled admirably a matron's duties. Few most places at the grating, or leering and scoffing at all comers, might now be seen clad in clean gowns and aprons, seated round a long table and stitching busily, while they listened with grave, attentive faces to the book read aloud by Mrs. Fry or one of the lady visitors who had volunteered under her. 'Till a matron could be found, one or other of these ladies spent the whole day in the prison. Before the daily work began a

Nor was Elizabeth Fry less thoughtful for those who exchanged Newgate only for a dreary exile in the antipodes. Hitherto there had often been wild scenes on shipboard during the four months' voyage. Now peaceful labour took the place of riot and confusion. While the convict ships lay at Deptford she and her helpers stocked them

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