As soon as she was able to travel, she returned to her family and completed her restoration to health in the beautiful surroundings of her well-loved homes of Embley Park and Lea Hurst. There she spent the ensuing months in her old work of quiet benevolence amongst the poor and infirm in the parishes, where her name was even then a household word. Added to her kindness of heart, which the people had long known, “Miss Florence” had now returned from “furren parts” with a knowledge of sick nursing which astounded the rustic mind. It was rumoured that she could set a broken leg better than the doctor, and had remedies for “rheumatiz” and lumbago which made old men feel young again, and as for her lotions for the eyes, “Why, they was enough to ruin the spectacle folk.” At this period the immediate vicinity of Miss Nightingale’s Derbyshire home was the scene of the labours of “Dr.” John Smedley, the Father of Hydropathy and the founder of the now famous “Smedley’s Hydropathic” at Matlock Bank. Although Miss Nightingale did not, I believe, specially ally herself with hydropathy, she has always been an advocate for the simple rules of health and diet as against the drug treatment. She could not fail to have been deeply interested in the experiments which good John Smedley and his mother were conducting practically at her own door, and they form a part of the environment which was shaping her mind at this period. The old stone house in which John Smedley lived while he was experimenting still stands near the bottom of the steep road leading to Lea Hurst. It has been divided into three small dwellings, but the outside railings over which Mrs. Smedley used to hand her son’s simple remedies to the villagers, and to the employees at Smedley’s Mills, on the opposite side of the road, are still pointed out by old inhabitants. The hamlet was particularly good for pioneer work of this kind, because of the hundreds of workers, chiefly women and girls, from the surrounding countryside who obtained employment at Lea Mills. The Derbyshire quarries and smelting works in the vicinity also yielded further patients for treatment. In course of time John Smedley started two free hospitals near his house, one for men and one for women, and the patients were subjected to the hydropathic regimen with such beneficial results that he started the hydropathic establishment known by his name at Matlock.