Elizabeth stopped
and talked with the woman. As the day was cold, she took off her mittens
and gave them to the beggar, and went her way. The next day she again saw
the woman on the same corner and again talked with her, asking to see the
baby held so closely within the tattered shawl. An intuitive glance
(mother herself or soon to be) told her that this sickly babe was not the
child of the woman who held it. She asked questions that the woman evaded.
Pressed further, the beggar grew abusive, and took refuge in curses, with
dire threats of violence. Mrs. Fry withdrew, and waiting for nightfall
followed the woman: down a winding alley, past rows of rotting tenements,
into a cellar below a ginshop. There, in this one squalid room, she found
a dozen babies, all tied fast in cribs or chairs, starving, or dying of
inattention. The woman, taken by surprise, did not grow violent this time:
she fled, and Mrs. Fry, sending for two women Friends, took charge of the
sufferers.

This sub-cellar nursery opened the eyes of Mrs. Fry to the grim fact that
England, professing to be Christian, building costly churches, and
maintaining an immense army of paid priests, was essentially barbaric. She
set herself to the task of doing what she could while life lasted to
lessen the horror of ignorance and sin.

Newgate Prison then, as now, stood in the center of the city. It was
necessary to have it in a conspicuous place so that all might see the
result of wrongdoing and be good. Along the front of the prison were
strong iron gratings, where the prisoners crowded up to talk with their
friends. Through these gratings the unhappy wretches called to strangers
for alms, and thrust out long wooden spoons for contributions, that would
enable them to pay their fines. There was a woman's department; but if the
men's department was too full, men and women were herded together.

Mrs. Fry worked for her sex, so of these I will speak. Women who had
children under seven years of age took them to prison with them; every
week babes were born there, so that at one time, in the year Eighteen
Hundred Twenty-six, we find there were one hundred ninety women and one
hundred children in Newgate. There was no bedding. No clothing was
supplied, and those who had no friends outside to supply them clothing
were naked or nearly so, and would have been entirely were it not for that
spark of divinity which causes the most depraved of women to minister to
one another. Wo