The "happy six weeks at Lea Hurst" were a time, as appears from the letter to Miss Nicholson already given (p. 53), when she found opportunity to do much sick-visiting. "One's days pass away," she added in the same letter, "like a shadow, and leave not a trace behind. How we spend hours that are sacred in things that are profane, which we choose to call necessities, and then say 'We cannot' to our Father's business." At Embley the opportunities for work among the poor were less favourable. The distances were greater. Florence interested herself, so far as she was able, in the school at Wellow; and amongst her papers of 1846 there is an able discussion of the defects of elementary education as she had there observed them. But the distractions were many. There was a constant round of company at home; and, as has been said before, the migrations of the family between London, Lea Hurst, and Embley were fatal to concentration of effort. III The year 1847 was one of much social movement in Miss Nightingale's life. In the spring she was in London "doing the exhibitions and hearing Jenny Lind; but it really requires a new language to define her." Then she went with her parents to the meeting of the British Association at Oxford, where Adams and Leverrier, the twin discoverers of Neptune, were the lions of the day. She wrote many lively accounts of the meeting to her friends, from which a passage or two may be given:-- Here we are in the midst of loveliness and learning; for never anything so beautiful as this place is looking now, my dearest, have I seen abroad or at home, with its flowering acacias in the midst of its streets of palaces. I saunter about the churchyards and gardens by myself before breakfast, and wish I were a College man. I wish you could see the Astronomical Section--Leverrier and Adams sitting on either side of the President, like a pair of turtle-doves cooing at their joint star and holding it between them.... We work hard. Chapel at 8, to that glorious service at New College; such an anthem yesterday morning! and that quiet cloister where no one goes. I brought home a white rose to-day to dry in remembrance. Sections from 11 to 3. Then Colleges or Blenheim till dinner time. Then lecture at 8 in the Radcliffe Library. And philosophical tea and muffins at somebody's afterwards. The Fowlers, Hamilton Grays, Barlows and selves are the muffins; Wheatstone, Hallam, Chevalier, Monckton Milnes and some of the great guns occasionally are the philosophy....