The fact is of some significance in understanding the circumstances of her life at this time, and the nature of her struggle for independence. Emancipated or revolting daughters are sometimes pardoned or condoned if they can aver that they have few home ties. To Mrs. Nightingale it may have seemed that in the domestic intercourse within so large a family circle, any comfortable daughter might find abundance of outlet and interest. And so, in one respect at least, her daughter Florence did. The maternal instinct in her, for which she was not in her own person to find fruition, went out in almost passionate fullness to the young cousin, William Shore Smith, mentioned above. He was "her boy," she used to say, from the day on which he was put as a baby into her arms when she was eleven years old. Up to the time of his going up to Cambridge, he spent a portion of his holidays in every year at Lea Hurst or Embley. Florence's letters at such times were full of him. She was successively his nurse, playfellow, and tutor. "The son of my heart," she called him; "while he is with me all that is mine is his, my head and hands and time." It generally happens in any large family circle that there is one woman to whom all its members instinctively turn when trouble comes or help is needed. Florence was the one in the Nightingale circle who filled this rôle of Sister of Mercy or Emergency Man--taking charge of one household when an aunt was away, or being dispatched to another when illness was prevalent. In 1845 she spent some time with her father's mother, who was threatened with paralysis, and whom she nursed into partial recovery. "I am very glad sometimes," she wrote from her grandmother's sick-room to her cousin Hilary, "to walk in the valley of the shadow of death as I do here; there is something in the stillness and silence of it which levels all earthly troubles. God tempers our wings in the waters of that valley, and I have not been so happy or so thankful for a long time. And yet it is curious, in the last years of life, that we should go down-hill in order to climb up the other side; that in the struggle of the spiritual with the material part of the universe, the material should get the better, and the soul, just at the moment of becoming spiritualised for ever, should seem to become more materialised." She made a similar reflection a little later in the same year (1845), when tending her old nurse, Gale, in her last illness. "The old lady's spirit," she wrote, "was in her pillow-cases, and one night when she thought she was dying, and I was sitting up with her, she said, 'Now, Miss Florence, mind you have two new cases made for this bed, for I think whoever sleeps here next year will find them comfortable.'" The death-bed of the nurse of the Queen of Nurses deserves some note. The last words of Mrs. Gale, as reported in other letters, were, "Don't wake the cook," "Hannah, go to your work," and "Miss Florence, be careful in