much I should like to see that excellent woman, Madame Fry, in Russia’; and often did I indulge that wish. What a meeting it would have been, between two such devoted philanthropists as your mother and the dowager Empress, who was daily devoting her time and fortune to doing good. . . . Although the Empress was in her sixty-ninth year, I had the felicity of accompanying her in no less than eleven of her personal visits to the Lunatic Asylum, say from February to October, 1828. On the 24th of October she died, to the deep-felt regret of the whole empire. Rozoff, a young lunatic, as soon as he heard it, burst into tears. She would visit each lunatic, when bodily afflicted, and send an easy chair for one, and nicely-dressed meat for others; and weekly send from the palace wine, coffee, tea, sugar, and fruit for their use.
“Among the many striking features in your mother’s correspondence, her love to the Word of God, and her desire for its general circulation, were very apparent. Evidently, that sacred book was the fountain whence she herself derived all that strength and grace to carry on her work of faith and labour of love, which her Divine Master so richly blessed. . . . In December 1827, when accompanying the Emperor Nicholas through the new Litoffsky Prison, he was not only well pleased to find every cell fully supplied with the Scriptures—the rich result of his having confirmed the late Emperor Alexander’s orders to give the Scriptures gratis to all the prisoners—but on seeing some Jews in the prison he said to me: ‘I hope you also furnish these poor people with them, that they may become Christians; I pity them.’ I witnessed a most touching scene on the Emperor’s cutting the Debtor’s Room; three old, venerable, grey-headed men fell on their knees and
