personages were anxious to hear about the work of prison reform, and to aid in it. After this they departed for Amsterdam, Bremen, and other places; but their journey resembled a triumphal progress more than anything else. The peasantry followed the carriage, shouting Mrs. Fry’s name, and begging for tracts. Sometimes, in order to get away, she was compelled to shake hands with them all, and speak a few words of kindly greeting.
They extended the journey into Denmark, and were treated with marked honour from the first. The Queen engaged apartments for the travellers at the Hotel Royal, and on some occasions took Mrs. Fry to see schools and other places, in her own carriage. On a subsequent day, when dining with the King and Queen, Mrs. Fry and Mr. Gurney laid before their Majesties the condition of persecuted Christians; the sad state of prisons in his dominions; they also referred to the slavery in the Danish colonies in the West Indies. Mr. Gurney having only recently returned from that part of the world, he had much to tell respecting the spiritual and social state of those colonies. Mrs. Fry records that at dinner she was placed between the King and Queen, who both conversed very pleasantly with her.
At Minden, they had varied experiences of travelling and travellers’ welcomes. “I could not but be struck,” says Mrs. Fry in her journal, “with the peculiar contrast of my circumstances: in the morning traversing the bad pavement of a street in Minden, with a poor old Friend in a sort of knitted cap close to her head; in the evening surrounded by the Prince and Princesses of a German Court.” The members of the Prussian royal family were anxious to see her and hear
