"dreaming" and never "doing." She was dreaming because for a long time she did not clearly feel or see what her work in life was to be; and then for yet another period of time because, when she knew what she was called to do, she could not compass the means to do it. Her faculties were not brought outwards, but were left, by the conditions of her life, to devour themselves inwardly. [9] The Rev. J. T. Giffard. The discovery of her true vocation belongs, then, to a later period of our story; and it was not the result of childish fancy, or the accomplishment of early incident; it was the fruit of long and earnest study. What did come to Florence Nightingale early in life--perhaps, as one entry in her autobiographical notes suggests, as early as her sixth year--was the sense of a "call"; of some appointed mission in life; of self-dedication to the service of God. "I remember her," wrote Fanny Allen in 1857 to her niece Elizabeth Wedgwood, "as a little girl of three or four, then the girl of sixteen of high promise. When I look back on every time I saw her after her sixteenth year, I see that she was ripening constantly for her work, and that her mind was dwelling on the painful differences of man and man in this life, and on the traps that a luxurious life laid for the affluent. A conversation on this subject between the father and daughter made me laugh at the time, the contrast was so striking; but now, as I remember it, it was the Divine Spirit breathing in her."[10] In an autobiographical fragment written in 1867 Florence mentions as one of the crises of her inner life that "God called her to His service" on February 7, 1837, at Embley; and there are later notes which still fix that day as the dawn of her true life. But as yet she knew not whither the Spirit was to lead. For three months, indeed, as she notes in another passage of retrospect, she "worked very hard among the poor people" under "a strong feeling of religion." [10] _A Century of Family Letters_, vol. ii. p. 174. V