A LITTLE GIRL AND FAME.

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 96, 27 April 1929, Page 19

A LITTLE GIRL AND FAME.

One day a little girl sat on a hassock listening to a speech made by a woman. When she left the meeting friends said to the child, "Never forget that you have heard Elizabeth Fry. When you aio older you will know how she reformed the prisons." The little girl never did forget, though she lived to be 93, and has only just died. She was Mary Elizabeth Bennett, whose father was at one time editor of the Quaker Journal called the "Friend," and knew all sorts of famous people. Once (think of it!) the Bennetts took Wordsworth's cottage for three months. Many lovers of poetry would give almost anything to have slept in the poet's bed, written at his desk, fingered his books, sat in his chair. • But little Elizabeth did better than that, for she often talked to the great man himself and his wonderful sister Dorothy, whose journals are so beautiful, but who, it is disconcerting to learn, was considered by the young Quaker as "rather childish." Mary Bennett knew Hartley Coleridge, the tragic son of Samuel- Taylor Coleridge, who was six when Wordsworth wrote of him:— I think of theo with many fears For what may be thy lot in. future years Miss Bennett remembered him as a grown man, with a mad air, who went about whirling a stick and reciting poetry. When she was little her father gave up all his other work in order to devote himself to the education of his three children, and he made learning seem so interesting that she never ceased to learn. From her father's study she went to Dresden for two years, and then to Bedford College in London. She was in the first party Thomas Cook took to Palestine. All her life she was faithful to the Quakers, and wore simple clothes recalling the traditional costume. People would point out the picturesque old lady, and whisper to strangers that she was wonderfully learned, and had seen worth.