Her interview with the Quaker-saint, Elizabeth Fry, though deliberately sought and of abiding effect, was but a brief episode. It was about this time that they met in London. The serene old Quakeress, through whose countenance looked forth such a heavenly soul, was no doubt keenly interested in the ardent, witty, beautiful girl who came to her for inspiration and counsel. They had much in common, and who knows but the older woman, with all her weight of experience, her saintly character, and ripened harvest, may yet in some ways have felt herself the younger of the two; for she had come to that quiet threshold of the life beyond, where a soul like hers has part in the simple joys of the Divine Child, and looks tenderly on those who are still in the fires of battle through which they have passed. Her own girlhood had defied in innocent ways the strictness of the Quaker rule. Imagine a young Quakeress of those days wearing, as she had done on occasion, a red riding habit! She had been fond of dancing, and would have, I suspect, a very healthy human interest in the activities of a girl in Society, though she would enter into Florence Nightingale’s resolve that her life should not be frittered away in a self-centred round, while men and women, for whom her Master died, were themselves suffering a slow death in workhouses and prisons and hospitals, with none to tend their wounds of soul and body. Be this as it may—and without a record of their conversation it is easy to go astray in imagining—we do know that like all the greatest saints they were both very practical in their Christianity, and did not care too much what was thought of their actions, so long as they were right in the sight of God. In their common sense, their humility, their warm, quick-beating heart of humanity, they were kindred spirits. The interview bore fruit even outwardly afterwards in a very important way. For it was from Elizabeth Fry that Florence Nightingale first heard of Pastor Fliedner and his institute for training nurses at Kaiserswerth, as well as of Elizabeth Fry’s own institute for a like purpose in London, which first suggested the Kaiserswerth training home, thus returning in ever-widening blessing the harvest of its seed.