Presently, however, a new direction was given to her thoughts and interests. She was now seventeen, her sister eighteen. Their home education had been far advanced, and might seem to require only such "finishing" as masters and society in France and Italy could supply. Mr. Nightingale had, moreover, decided to carry out extensive alterations at Embley. With his wife and daughters, he crossed from Southampton to Havre on September 8, 1837, and they did not return to England till April 6, 1839. Those were days of leisurely travel, such as Ruskin describes, in which "distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that toil was rewarded, partly by the power of deliberate survey of the countries through which the journey lay, and partly by the happiness of the evening hours, when from the top of the last hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village where he was to rest, scattered among the meadows beside its valley stream; or, from the long-hoped-for turn in the dusty perspective of the causeway, saw, for the first time, the towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset--hours of peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an equivalent." There were many such hours during the journeys which the Nightingales took with a _vetturino_ through France and Italy; and Florence, writing at a later date, when all her life was fixed on doing, noted that on this tour there was "too much time for dreaming." Yet it is clear from her diaries that she entered heartily, and with a wider range of interest than some English travellers show, into the life of foreign society and sight-seeing. A love of statistical method which became one of her most marked characteristics may already be seen in an itinerary which she compiled; noting, in its several columns, the number of leagues from place to place, with the day and the hour both of arrival and of departure. They went leisurely through France, visiting, besides many other places, Chartres, Blois, Tours, Nantes, Bordeaux, Biarritz, Carcassonne, Nîmes, Avignon, and Toulon, and then going by the Riviera to Nice. There they stayed for nearly a month (Dec. 1837-Jan. 1838). A month was next spent at Genoa, and two months were given to Florence. The late spring and summer were devoted to travel in the cities of Northern Italy, among the lakes, and in Switzerland. They spent the month of September in Geneva, and reached Paris on October 8, 1838. Miss Nightingale preserved her diary of the greater part of the tour, and it shows her keenly interested alike in scenery and in works of art. It contains also, what records of sentimental pilgrimages often lack, an admixture of notes and statistics upon the laws, the land systems, the social conditions and benevolent institutions of the several states or cantons. Her interest in the politics of the day was