The terraced garden at the back of the house, with its sweet old-fashioned flowers and blossoming apple trees, has doubtless grown more delightful with every year of its advancing age, but what an interest the two little girls must have had when it was first being planted out and each could find a home for her favourite flowers! Fuchsias were among those loved by little Florence, who, as has already been noted, was only six years old when she and her sister and father and mother moved into Lea Hurst, and there was a large bed of these outside the chapel. The old schoolroom and nursery at the back of the house look out upon the hills, and in a quiet corner of the garden there is a summer-house where Florence and her only sister, who had no brothers to share their games, must often have played and worked.
Lea Hurst is a quiet, beautiful home, characteristically English and unpretending, with a modest park-gate, and beyond the park those Lea Woods where the hyacinths bloom and where it is still told how “Miss Florence” loved to walk through the long winding avenue with its grand views of the distant hills and woods.
But the Nightingales did not spend the whole year at Lea Hurst. In the autumn it was their custom to move to Embley, in Hampshire, where they spent the winter and early spring. They usually sent the servants on ahead with the luggage, and drove by easy stages in their own carriage, taking the journey at leisure, and putting up at inns by the way. Sometimes, of course, they travelled by coach. Those of us who only know the Derby road in the neighbourhood of towns like Nottingham and Derby now that its coaching glories are past, find it difficult to picture its gaiety in those old coaching days, when the very horses enjoyed the liveliness of the running, and the many carriages with their gay postilions and varied occupants were on the alert for neighbour or friend who might be posting in the same direction.
Whether in autumn or in spring, the drive must have been a joy. The varied beauty of the Midlands recalls the lines in “Aurora Leigh” which speak of
“Such nooks of valleys lined with orchises,
Fed full of noises by invisible streams;
And open pastures where you scarcely tell
White daisies from white dew, ...
... the clouds, the fields,
The happy violets hiding from the roads