It was in the bedroom above described, or in the smaller room in front with which it communicated, that the greater part of Miss Nightingale's life for forty-five years was passed. She seldom went out of doors in London. It was believed that occasionally, at times when her heart and nerves were giving her less than the usual sense of weakness, she went out on foot into the Park; but the belief was only whispered: it was a point of honour amongst her circle to respect her house-ridden seclusion. The secret may now be divulged, on the authority of many notes from Sir Harry Verney, that he lured her out now and then for a morning drive and stroll in the Park, especially in rhododendron-time, "to remind her of Embley," as aforesaid. Miss Nightingale, except in the few travel-years of her youth, had little enjoyment from nature in its grander or larger aspects, but she knew how to find pleasure in the commoner sights and sounds; in flowers and birds, and in London skies. There was a tree in the garden of Dorchester House where the birds used to gather, and from which they flew to be fed at Miss Nightingale's window. She had studied the dietary of birds as carefully as of hospital patients, and imparted the rudiments of such lore to the "Dicky-Bird Society."[186] In the country she liked to have a view from her bedroom of trees and flowers, and often in the early morning watches she wrote down her observations. Her balcony at Lea Hurst gave her a great deal of pleasure. It is large, being the top of the drawing-room bow; you see a wide stretch of sky from it, and it commands the view described by Mrs. Gaskell.[187] At Claydon she had her pet birds and squirrels, and used to write about them to Sir Harry's grandchildren. She took a great interest in elementary education, and insisted almost as much upon the importance of simple nature studies as upon that of physical training. "On very fine noondays in London," she wrote (Dec. 1888), "when there is nearly as much light as there is in a country dusk, the storm-like effects of the sun peeping out are more like the light streaming from the Glory in Heaven of the old Italian Masters than anything I know. And I wonder whether the poor people see it. And in old days when I walked out of doors, the murky effect at the end of the perspective of a long dull street running E. and W. was a real peep into heaven. I should teach these things in Board Schools to children condemned to live their lives in the streets of London, as I would teach the botany of leaves and trees and flowers to country children." Cheap popular books were much wanted giving account of "the habits, structure, and characters (what they are about, not classification) of plants as living beings"; and of birds treated in like fashion, and not from the point of view of ornithological classification. "I had a lovely little popular book with woodcuts, published in Calcutta," she wrote,[188] "on the plants of Bengal.