recovered, she made herself his assiduous nurse. Her schooling was completely interrupted and she hardly left the invalid's room. suffered, she ceased to grow,

Her own health her stature remain

ing but little more than five feet, but the experience left her highly skilled in the care of the sick.

She appears in general to have led a model childhood, conquering her timidities, accepting meekly her parents' refusal to let her learn dancing, and acquitting herself creditably at the schools of her native town, where she was taught in part by her sisters and brother Stephen, and became a teacher herself. This seemed her destined employment, as it seemed, but was not, theirs. After eighteen years of it in and about Oxford, she felt the need of a more thorough mental training and went in 1852 as later young women of her type would have sought a college- - to the Liberal Institute at Clinton, New York, from which she emerged a year later, at thirty-two, a well-equipped "Yankee schoolmarm."

A "teacher dyed in the wool" was what she called herself at this period. Somewhat fortuitously she drifted from Massachusetts, via Clinton, New York, to Bordentown, New Jersey, where, with the true spirit of a pioneer, she volunteered and was

permitted to conduct the first public school in the place. A strong local sentiment opposed the opening of such a "pauper school," but Clara Barton, beginning with six pupils in 1853, gave over in 1855 to a male principal the charge of six hundred pupils her biographers assure us - assembled in the building she had led the town to erect. For this success she paid dear through a breakdown involving the complete loss of her voice. To recuperate she moved to Washington, unaware that her school-teaching was over and that for nearly sixty years she was to live chiefly at the national capital, in a close relation, through many of these years, with the government and its administrators.

Here again she became a sort of pioneer, as one of the first, if not the very first, of women employed as a government clerk on the same terms with men. It was not an easy berth which she found in the Patent Office at $1400 a year. The male clerks, among whom there was plenty of incompetence and dishonesty, resented her presence, puffed tobacco smoke in her face, and made her generally uncomfortable. Her "copperplate" handwriting, her faithfulness and complete integrity, did not save her from dismissal in 1857, when, in the Buchanan administration, she fell under the ban of Black Republicanism. She had heard Sumner's speech,

"The Crime against Kansas," the night before he was assaulted in the Senate, and long afterwards declared that the Civil War began "not at Sumter but at Sumner." Dismissed from her post in 1857, she spent nearly two years with her family in Oxford until recalled to straighten out the Patent Office records entangled by her absence.

So she found herself at forty a useful servant of

the government at Washington, a small woman, of simple habit, with brown eyes and brown hair, in which she said much later that one gray hair was to be found, though she had forgotten just where, - with a soft voice that grew deep instead of shrill under stress of the anger of which she was healthily capable, with pronounced, regular, and mobile features, neither beautiful nor the reverse. Unlike Florence Nightingale, the great Crimean prototype of war nurses, · a personage of whom Clara Barton had hardly heard as late as 1863 when somebody called her "the Florence Nightingale of America,"

she was without the advantages, serviceable even in America, of a commanding social position. This lever for reform was hardly required in the highly personal work which she undertook in the Civil War. It did not call for any great arraying of forces and influences behind her. Her kinsman and biographer, the Rev. William E. Barton, makes

a significant statement in saying: "She was never able to look upon armies as mere masses of troops; she had to remember that they were individual men, each capable of suffering pain in his own person, and each of them carrying with him to the front the anxious thoughts of loved ones at home."

The very first instance of Clara Barton's helpfulness to Union soldiers was typical of its intensely personal character throughout the war. The Sixth Massachusetts Regiment, from which the first blood of the war was drawn as it passed through Baltimore, reached Washington late in April 1861, and, in the general dearth of accommodations, was quartered in the United States Senate Chamber. Here Miss Barton visited the soldiers, found friends and acquaintances from Worcester among them, and, establishing herself in the Speaker's chair, read aloud to them from a recent copy of the Worcester Spy which had somehow followed them to Washington. To that journal she immediately sent advertisements declaring that she would distribute personally any supplies or money sent to her for wounded and needy members of the regiment. The response was such that she was obliged to secure space in a Washington warehouse. This was the method she continued to practise. Her own modest competence, supplemented by the Patent Office

salary, which an honorable arrangement with superiors and fellow workers enabled her to go on drawing, provided her with funds which she devoted generously to the cause she was asking others to further. At every turn her work was direct and immediate.

All this while the United States Sanitary Commission and, in lesser degree, the Christian Commission were organizing and developing work much more like that of the Red Cross in later years than anything Clara Barton was doing. Towards the end of the war Clara Barton accepted an appointment as "Superintendent of the Department of Nurses for the Army of the James'; but for the most part she was essentially a free lance, whose view of her own status was frankly that of the individualist, indeed the egotist, to be found in every pioneer and reformer. "If I have by practice," she wrote in 1864, "acquired any skill, it belongs to me to use untrammeled, and I might not work as efficiently, or labor as happily, under the direction of those of less experience than myself."

This experience of hers was indeed extensive. It began and for the better part of the first war-year was concentrated in Washington where she ministered to wounded soldiers as they returned from the battle front and in the hospitals. In the spring of