In a room to the left the date 1799 has been scratched upon one of the window-panes, but the erection of the Hall must have been long before that time. For the rest, it is a rambling old house with thick walls and deep window embrasures. The ceilings are moderately high. There is an old-fashioned garden at the back, with fruit and shady trees and a particularly handsome copper beech. The Hall has long been used as a farmhouse, and scarcely one out of the hundreds of visitors to the Matlock district who go on pilgrimages to Lea Hurst knows of its interesting association. The old lady who occupied it at the time of my visit was not a little proud of the fact that for forty-four years she had lived in the first English home of Florence Nightingale. The casual visitor might think the district amid which our heroine’s early years were spent was a pleasant Derbyshire wild and nothing more, but it has also much historic interest. Across the meadows from Lea Hall are the remains of the stately mansion of Dethick, where dwelt young Anthony Babington when he conspired to release Mary Queen of Scots from her imprisonment at Wingfield Manor, a few miles away. Over these same meadows and winding lanes Queen Elizabeth’s officers searched for the conspirators and apprehended one at Dethick. The mansion where the plot was hatched has been largely destroyed, and what remains is used for farm purposes. Part of the old wall which enclosed the original handsome building still stands, and beside it is an underground cellar which according to tradition leads into a secret passage to Wingfield Manor. The farm bailiff who stores his potatoes in the cellar has not been able to find the entrance to the secret passage, though at one side of the wall there is a suspicious hollow sound when it is hammered. The original kitchen of the mansion remains intact in the bailiff’s farmhouse. There is the heavy oak-beamed ceiling, black with age, the ponderous oak doors, the great open fireplace, desecrated by a modern cooking range in the centre, but which still retains in the overhanging beam the ancient roasting jack which possibly cooked venison for Master Anthony and the other gallant young gentlemen who had sworn to liberate the captive Queen. In the roof of the ceiling is an innocent-looking little trap-door which, when opened, reveals a secret chamber of some size. This delightful old kitchen, with its mysterious memories, was a place of great fascination to Florence Nightingale and her sister in their childhood, and many stories did they weave about the scenes which transpired long ago in the old mansion, so near their own home. It was a source of peculiar interest to have the scenes of a real Queen Mary romance close at hand, and gave zest to the subject when the sisters read about the Babington plot in their history books.