for that very reason, it meant more to its readers. It meant so much to Stephen Barton and his wife, Sarah (Stone) Barton - or at least to one of them

that the youngest of their five children, younger by ten years than her next older sister, received the name of Clarissa Harlowe Barton. The "Clarissa" was soon abridged into Clara. The "Harlowe❞ survived, at least until 1867, when "Clara Harlowe Barton" was the subject of a memoir in L. P. Brockett's Women in the Civil War, a volume adorned with an engraved frontispiece designated "Miss Clara H. Barton.'

The simple name of Clara Barton was much more suited to her as both girl and woman. Her early background was simplicity itself. Her father was a substantial farmer, of sound New England stock, who had fought under "Mad Anthony" Wayne. His interest in military and political matters never left him, and at his knee his youngest daughter acquired an early knowledge of army and government affairs. "I thought the President," she wrote in later years, "might be as large as the meeting-house, and the Vice-President perhaps the size of the schoolhouse." At the same time she gained the understanding which enabled her to declare of herself in war-time: "I never addressed a colonel as captain, got my cavalry on foot, or mounted my

infantry!" In her father also she had an early instructor in the value of the philanthropic interests which were included in his spirit of patriotism. Her mother, a notable New England housewife, was a woman of strong will and a quick temper.

From such parents an inheritance of fear was something abnormal; yet, in looking back on her own childhood, Clara Barton once wrote, "I remember nothing but fear." When she was sent away from home to school as a little girl her timidity at table kept her from eating the food set before her, and it was found necessary to return her to her parents. Their liberality of spirit made them Universalists and "come-outers" in general, afraid not even of phrenologists, one of whom, consulted with regard to the timorous Clara, pronounced: "The sensitive nature will always remain. She will never assert herself for herself; she will suffer wrong first. But for others she will be perfectly fearless. Throw responsibility upon her."

This prescription was fulfilled largely by the force of circumstances. For one thing, in the words of an account of her work in the Civil War, “she was early taught that primal benediction, miscalled a curse, which requires mankind to earn their bread." Like her parents, her older brothers and sisters were workers. Activity of body and mind

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charged the atmosphere in which she grew up. Besides learning early to cook and to wash ployments to which she often turned in her later years she was taught to paint a house, to weave at a hand loom, to make herself a straw hat from blades of rye of her own cutting and bleaching. In ways of greater daring her brother David, whom she greatly admired and afterwards described as "the Buffalo Bill of the surrounding country," taught her much. When she was no more than five years old he used to take her to a field in which their father's blooded colts were pastured, seize and bridle two of them, and -to quote Clara Barton's own words "gathering the reins of both bridles firmly in hand, throw me upon the back of one colt, spring upon the other himself, and catching me by one foot, and bidding me 'cling fast to the mane,' gallop away over field and fen, in and out among the other colts in wild glee like ourselves." From that, her only riding-school, she acquired a horsemanship which in war-time stood her in good stead.

Through the same teacher came her first experience of nursing. When she was about ten years old this paragon of older brothers suffered serious injuries in falling from a ridgepole at a barn-raising. For two years, until she was twelve and he had