double memorial of the national—nay, imperial—recognition of its value. The Royal Pension Fund for Nurses also, in which Queen Alexandra was so specially interested, helped to crown the fulfilment of Miss Nightingale’s early dream and long, steadfast life-work. But equally important, though less striking, has been the growing harvest of her quiet, courteous efforts to help village mothers to understand the laws of health, her pioneer-work in regard to all the dangers of careless milk-farms, her insistence on the importance of pure air as well as pure water, though she had always been careful to treat the poor man’s rooftree as his castle and never to cross his doorstep except by permission or invitation. After the death of her father at Embley in 1874—a very peaceful death, commemorated in the inscription on his tomb, “In Thy light we shall see light,” which suggests in him a nature at once devout and sincere—she was much with her mother, in the old homes at Embley and Lea Hurst, though Lea Hurst was the one she loved best, and the beech-wood walk in Lea Woods, with its radiant shower of golden leaves in the autumn, for which she would sometimes delay her leaving, is still specially associated with her memory: and her thoughtfulness for the poor still expressed itself in many different ways—in careful gifts, for instance, through one whom she trusted for knowledge and tact; in her arrangement that pure milk should be sent daily from the home dairy at Lea Hurst to those in need of it. With faithful love she tended her mother to the time of her death in 1880, and there seems to be a joyous thanksgiving for that mother’s beauty of character in the words the two sisters inscribed to her memory: “God is love—Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits.” After her mother’s death, when the property had passed into the hands of Mr. William Shore Nightingale, she still visited her kinsman there and kept up her interest in the people of the district. Among the outward events of her life, after her return from the Crimea, one of the earliest had been the marriage of her sister Parthenope, who in 1858 became the second wife of Sir Harry Verney,[20] and her home at Claydon in Buckinghamshire was thenceforth a second home to Miss Nightingale. It need hardly be said that in Sir Harry Verney’s various generous schemes for the good of the neighbourhood, schemes in which his wife cordially co-operated, Miss Nightingale took a warm and sympathetic pleasure. His keen interest in army reform was, of course, a special ground of comradeship. Miss Nightingale divided her time chiefly between her own home in South Street, Park Lane, and visits to the rooms that were reserved for her at Claydon. One of her great interests while at Claydon, soon after her sister’s marriage, had been the building of the new Buckinghamshire Infirmary in 1861, of which her sister laid the foundation; and her bust still adorns the entrance hall.