The author, an Englishman, offered me to write one on English plants in the same fashion; but one of the most popular and enterprising of all our publishers refused on the ground that it would not tell in Board School examinations and therefore would not pay." [186] Bibliography A, No. 136. [187] See Vol. I. p. 8. [188] Letter to the secretary of the Pure Literature Society, March 30, 1891. V During the years following her father's death (1874), Miss Nightingale devoted much time to the society of her mother, and this took her for a considerable part of each year out of London. In 1874 she and her mother spent a month at Claydon (Aug.-Sept.), and then two months at Lea Hurst. In 1875 the experiment was tried of taking a house at Upper Norwood, and there Miss Nightingale lived with her mother for some weeks (June-July). "I am out of humanity's reach," wrote Florence to Madame Mohl (June 18): "in a red villa like a monster lobster: a place which has no _raison d'être_ except the _raison d'être_ of lobsters or crabs--viz. to go backward and to feed and be fed upon. Stranger vicissitudes than mine in life few men have had--vicissitudes from slavery to power, and from power to slavery again. It does not seem like a vicissitude: a red villa at Norwood: yet it is the strangest I yet have had. It is the only time for 22 years that my work has not been the first cause for where I should live and how I should live. Here it is the last. It is the caricature of a life." The lobster-like villa was, however, soon given up. Mrs. Nightingale longed to be taken to her home--though, strictly, hers no longer, and from July to October she and Florence were at Lea Hurst. The year's routine now became fixed. The care of Mrs. Nightingale in London was undertaken by her nephew, Mr. Shore Smith, and his wife. She lived with them in their house in York Place, and from July or August in each year to November or December the Shore Smith family, with Mrs. Nightingale and her companion, moved to Lea Hurst, and there also Florence went--sometimes going to Lea Hurst before the others arrived, and sometimes staying there when they were absent.[189] Mr. Shore Smith was "more than son and daughter to her," Mrs. Nightingale said; and Florence, during her residence at Lea Hurst, devoted a stated number of hours each day--generally two or three in the morning--to companionship with her mother. In the country, as in South Street, Miss Nightingale constantly had nursing friends to stay with her. "At Lea Hurst," writes the friend already quoted, "she was as good to us as in London. I remember being there once with another of her pupils, and she told us that the rooms assigned to us had been the nurseries of her childhood. Long drives were contrived for us; luncheon was packed in the waggonette, and excursions were mapped out. During our visit Mr. Jowett came for a few days; he was very pleasant to us and full of kindness.