The authors whom Miss Nightingale read for the purpose of her selection included St. Angela of Foligno, Madame de Chatel, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Francis Xavier, St. John of the Cross, Peter of Alcantara, Father Rigoleuc, St. Teresa, and Father Surin. She arranged her extracts from these and other writers under headings, and supplied marginal summaries. She prepared also a title-page:--_Notes from Devotional Authors of the Middle Ages, Collected, Chosen, and Freely Translated by Florence Nightingale_. III This and all other literary work was interrupted, however, at the beginning of 1874 by the death of her father. She was in London; her sister and Sir Harry Verney were with him and Mrs. Nightingale at Embley. He was 80; but, though his strength of body and mind had failed a little, he had been out for his usual ride a few days before. Lady Verney had wished him good-night. "Say not good-night," he said in reply, quoting Mrs. Barbauld, "but in some brighter clime Bid me good-morning." A day or two later, he came down to breakfast as usual, but found that he had forgotten his watch. He went to fetch it, slipped upon the stairs, and died on the spot. Miss Nightingale felt the loss of her father deeply. "His reverent love for you," wrote Lord Houghton in a letter of condolence (Jan. 13, 1874), "was inexpressibly touching," and her love for him, though of a different kind, was very tender. Unlike in many respects, father and daughter were yet kindred spirits in intellectual curiosity, in a taste for speculative inquiry. M. Mohl noted among Mr. Nightingale's engaging characteristics "a modest curiosity about everything, a surprised, innocent, incredulous smile as he listened intently." Miss Irby spoke of his "exceeding sweetness and childlikeness of wisdom." These qualities were conspicuous in much of his intercourse with his daughter Florence, and she was now deprived of the father who had, in things of the mind, sat at her feet and sympathized in her searches after truth. The death of her father was quickly followed, on January 31, 1874, by that of her dearly loved friend, Mrs. Bracebridge. "She was more than mother to me," wrote Florence to M. and Madame Mohl (Feb. 3); "and oh that I could not be a daughter to her in her last sad days! What should I have been without her? and what would many have been without her? To one living with her as I did once, she was unlike any other human being: as unlike as a picture of a sunny scene is to the real light and warmth of sunshine: or as this February lamp we call our sun is to her own Sun of living light in Greece.... Other people live together to make each other worse: she lived with all to make them better. And she was not like a chastened Christian saint: no more like that than Apollo; but she had qualities which no Greek God ever had--real humility (excepting my dear Father, I never knew any one so really humble), and with it the most active heart