In her Derbyshire home she lived in touch with the life which at the same period was weaving its spell about Marian Evans, when she visited her kinspeople, and was destined to be immortalised in _Adam Bede_ and _The Mill on the Floss_. Amongst her father’s tenants Florence Nightingale knew farmers’ wives who had a touch of Mrs. Poyser’s caustic wit, and was familiar with the “Yea” and “Nay” and other quaint forms of Derbyshire speech, such as Mr. Tulliver used when he talked to “the little wench” in the house-place of the ill-fated Mill on the Floss. She met, too, many of “the people called Methodists,” who in her girlhood were establishing their preaching-places in the country around Lea Hurst, and she heard of the fame of the woman preacher, then exercising her marvellous gifts in the Derby district, who was to become immortal as Dinah Morris. In Florence Nightingale’s early womanhood, Adam Bede lived in his thatched cottage by Wirksworth Tape Mills, a few miles from Lea Hurst, and the Poysers’ farm stood across the meadows. The childhood of our heroine was passed amid surroundings which proved a singularly interesting environment. Steam power had not then revolutionised rural England: the counties retained their distinctive speech and customs, the young people remained on the soil where they were born, and the rich and the poor were thrown more intimately together. The effect of the greater personal intercourse then existing between the squire’s family and his people had an important influence on the character of Florence Nightingale in her Derbyshire and Hampshire homes. She learned sympathy with the poor and afflicted, and gained an understanding of the workings and prejudices of the uneducated mind, which enabled her in after years to be a real friend to those poor fellows fresh from the battlefields of the Crimea, many of whom had enlisted from the class of rural homes which she knew so well. When quite a child, Florence Nightingale showed characteristics which pointed to her vocation in life. Her dolls were always in a delicate state of health and required the utmost care. Florence would undress and put them to bed with many cautions to her sister not to disturb them. She soothed their pillows, tempted them with imaginary delicacies from toy cups and plates, and nursed them to convalescence, only to consign them to a sick bed the next day. Happily, Parthe did not exhibit the same tender consideration for her waxen favourites, who frequently suffered the loss of a limb or got burnt at the nursery fire. Then of course Florence’s superior skill was needed, and she neatly bandaged poor dolly and “set” her arms and legs with a facility which might be the envy of the modern miraculous bone-setter.