A pebble thrown into a lake sends the tiny circling ripples very far, and one good piece of work leads to others of a quite different kind. Pastor Fliedner, inspired by love to his Master and deeply interested in Elizabeth Fry’s efforts, began to help prisoners. Finding no nurses for those of them who were ill, he was led to found the institution at Kaiserswerth, where Miss Nightingale afterwards received a part of her training. His story is a beautiful one. His father and grandfather had both been pastors in the Lutheran Church, and, like so many sons of the Manse, he was exceedingly poor, but he lived to justify his name of Theodor. He was born twenty years before Miss Nightingale, in the village of Eppstein, and perhaps he was the more determined to prove to himself and others that he had a soul, because he was one of those plump children who get teased for looking like dumplings, and when his father laughingly called him the “little beer-brewer” he didn’t like it, for he was a bit thin-skinned. He worked his way bravely through school and college, Giessen and Göttingen, and not only earned his fees by teaching, but also his bread and roof; and when teaching was not enough, he had the good sense to turn shoeblack and carpenter and odd man. He valued all that opens the eyes of the mind and educates what is highest and best. Many a time, heedless of hardship and privation, he would, in his holidays, tramp long distances that he might see more of God’s world and learn more of men and things. He taught himself in this way to speak several languages, learned the useful healing properties of many herbs, and other homely knowledge that afterwards helped him in his work among the sick. Then, too, the games and songs that he picked up on his travels afterwards enriched his own kindergarten. While tutoring at Cologne, he did quite informally some of the work of a curate, and, through preaching sometimes in the prison, became interested in the lot of discharged prisoners. It was at Cologne too that he received from the mother of his pupils kindly suggestions as to his own manners, which led him to write what is as true as it is quaint, that “gentle ways and polite manners help greatly to further the Kingdom of God.”