And if study was made a serious business, the sisters enjoyed to the full the healthy advantages of country life. They scampered about the park with their dogs, rode their ponies over hill and dale, spent long days in the woods among the bluebells and primroses, and in summer tumbled about in the sweet-scented hay. “During the summer at Lea Hurst, lessons were a little relaxed in favour of outdoor life; but on the return to Embley for the winter, schoolroom routine was again enforced on very strict lines.”[3] In Florence Nightingale’s Derbyshire home the experiments in methods of healing which dispensed with drugs could not fail to arouse attention and discussion, for Mr. John Smedley’s newly-built cure-house stood at the foot of the hill below Lea Hurst, and before Florence Nightingale was twenty she had already begun to turn her attention definitely in the direction of nursing. Everything tended to deepen this idea. She was already able to do much for the villagers, and in any case of illness they were always eager to let her know. The consumptive girl whose room she gladdened with flowers was but one of the many ailing folk who found comfort and joy in her presence. “Miss Florence had a way with her that made them feel better,” they said. In those days nursing as a profession did not exist. When it was not done wholly for love by the unselfish maiden aunt or sister, who was supposed, as a matter of course, to be always at the disposal of the sick people among her kinsfolk, it had come to be too often a mere callous trade, carried on by ignorant and grasping women, who were not even clean or of good character. The turning of a Scutari hell into a hospital that seemed heaven by comparison, was a smaller miracle than that which Miss Nightingale’s influence was destined later to achieve in changing a despised and brutalized occupation throughout a whole empire into a noble and distinguished art. Of course it must never be forgotten that through all the centuries since the Christian Church was founded, there had been Catholic sisterhoods with whom the real and the ideal were one—Sisters of Mercy, who were not only refined and cultivated gentlewomen, but the most devoted and self-sacrificing of human souls.