Her life was many-sided, and her devotion to good works did not arise from any lack of knowledge of the world. She was presented, of course, like other girls of her order, and had her “seasons” in London as well as her share in country society. A young and lovely girl, whose father had been wise enough to give her all the education and advantages of a promising boy, and who excelled also in every distinctive feminine accomplishment and “pure womanliness,” had her earthly kingdom at her feet. But her soul was more and more deeply bent on a life spent in service and consecrated to the good of others. Her Sunday class, in the old building known as the “Chapel” at Lea Hurst, was but one of her many efforts in her father’s special domain in Derbyshire, and girls of every faith came to her there without distinction of creed. They were mostly workers in the hosiery mills owned by John Smedley, and many of them, like their master, were Methodists. She sang to them, and they still remember the sweetness of her voice and “how beautifully Miss Florence used to talk,” as they sat together through many a sunny afternoon in the tiny stone building overlooking Lea Hurst gardens. Cromford Church, built by Sir Richard Arkwright, was then comparatively new, and time had not made of it the pretty picture that it is now, in its bosoming trees above the river; but it played a considerable part in Florence Nightingale’s youth, when the vicar and the Arkwright of her day—old Sir Richard’s tomb in the chancel bears the earlier date of 1792—organized many a kind scheme for the good of the parish, in which the squire’s two daughters gave their help. But Miss Nightingale was not of a type to consider these amateur pleasures a sufficient training for her life-work, and that life-work was already taking a more or less definite shape in her mind. She herself has written:— “I would say to all young ladies who are called to any particular vocation, qualify yourselves for it as a man does for his work. Don’t think you can undertake it otherwise. Submit yourselves to the rules of business as men do, by which alone you can make God’s business succeed, for He has never said that He will give His success and His blessing to sketchy and unfinished work.” And on another occasion she wrote that “three-fourths of the whole mischief in women’s lives arises from their excepting themselves from the rules of training considered needful for men.” It has already been said that her thought was more and more directed towards nursing, and in various ways she was quietly preparing herself to that end.