He was only twenty-two when he became pastor of the little Protestant flock at Kaiserswerth, having walked there on foot and purposely taken his parishioners by surprise that they might not be put to the expense of a formal welcome. His yearly salary was only twenty pounds, and he helped his widowed mother by sharing the parsonage with a sister and two younger brothers, though in any case he had to house the mother of the man who had been there before him. Then came a failure in the business of the little town—the making of velvet—and though there were other rich communities that would have liked to claim him, he was true to his own impoverished flock, and set forth like a pilgrim in search of aid for them. In this apostolic journey he visited Holland and England as well as Germany, and it was in London that, in Elizabeth Fry, he found a noble kindred spirit, much older, of course, than himself, as we count the time of earth, but still full of all the tender enthusiasm of love’s immortal youth. Her wonderful work among the prisoners of Newgate sent him back to his own parish all on fire to help the prisoners of his own country, and he began at once with Düsseldorf, the prison nearest home. Through him was founded the first German organization for improving the discipline of prisons. Most of all he wanted to help the women who on leaving the prison doors were left without roof or protector. With his own hands he made clean his old summer-house, and in this shelter—twelve feet square—which he had furnished with a bed, a chair, and a table, he asked the All-father to lead some poor outcast to the little home he had made for her. It was at night that for the first time a poor forlorn creature came in answer to that prayer, and he and his wife led her in to the place prepared for her. Nine others followed, and, by the time the number had risen to twenty, a new building was ready for them with its own field and garden, and Fliedner’s wife, helped by Mademoiselle Gobel, who gave her services “all for love and nothing for reward,” had charge of the home, where many a one who, like the woman in the Gospel, “had been a great sinner” began to lead a new life and to follow Christ. For the children of some of these women a kindergarten arose; but the work of all others on which the pastor’s heart was set was the training of women to nurse and tend the poor; for in his own parish, where there was much illness and ignorance, there was no one to do this. Three years after his earlier venture, in 1836 when Miss Nightingale in her far-away home was a girl of sixteen still more or less in the schoolroom, this new undertaking was begun, this quiet haven, from which her own great venture long afterwards took help and teaching, was built up by this German saint. The failure of the velvet industry at Kaiserswerth, in the pastor’s first year, had left an empty factory which he turned into a hospital.