Their own family name had changed. Mr. Nightingale, who was first known as William Edward Shore, was the only son of Mr. William Shore of Tapton, in Derbyshire, and the child who was to reform England’s benighted views of nursing, and do so much for the health, not only of our British troops, but also of our Indian Army, was related through that family to John Shore, a famous physician in Derby in the reign of Charles the Second, as well as to the Governor-General of India who, twenty-three years before her birth, took the title of Baron Teignmouth. It was through her father’s mother, the only daughter of Mr. Evans of Cromford, that she was linked with the family of the Nightingales, whose name her father afterwards took. Mary Evans, her paternal grandmother, was the niece of “Old Peter,” a rich and roystering squire, who was well liked in his own neighbourhood, in spite of his nickname of “Madman Peter” and the rages that now and then overtook him. Florence Nightingale was, however, no descendant of his, for he never married, and all his possessions, except those which he sold to Sir Richard Arkwright, the famous cotton-spinner, came to his niece, who was the mother of Miss Nightingale’s father. When all this landed property came into the hands of Mr. Edward Shore, three years before his marriage and five years before Florence was born, his name was changed under the Prince Regent’s sign manual from Shore to Nightingale, in accordance with Peter Nightingale’s will. But he continued to live in Italy for a great part of every year until Florence was nearly five years old, though the change of ownership on the English estate was at once felt under the new squire, who was in most ways the very opposite of that “Old Peter,” of whom we read that when he had been drinking, as was then the fashion, he would frighten away the servant-maids by rushing into the kitchen and throwing the puddings on the dust-heap. Mr. Edward Nightingale, our heroine’s father, bore a character without fear or reproach. Educated at Edinburgh and at Trinity, Cambridge, he had afterwards travelled a good deal, at a time when travel was by no means the commonplace that it is now. He is described as “tall and slim,” and from the descriptions we have of him it is clear that no one, even at a glance, could have missed the note of distinction in his bearing, or mistaken him for other than that which he was proud to be, the cultivated and enlightened son of a fine old family. When we read that the lady he married was daughter of a strong Abolitionist, Mr. William Smith of Parndon, in Essex, we feel that the very name of Abolitionist belongs to a bygone past.