Part 8

At the Glen Echo Red Cross house, on the window-ledges, in the slats for window-catches, where the walls and ceilings join, in every nook and corner, the welcomed wasps had their little mud cells. While at the dining table, or at her writing desk, Miss Barton would cut an apple and sometimes around it would gather a swarm of these “pests.” Of the wasps, that nobody likes, she was wont to say “these are my little friends; they keep me company;”—as they hovered over and around her she seemed to get inspiration from them in her literary work.

In her early years Clara Barton’s special pets were the dog and the horse; in later years, the cat. She accredited her black and white cat at Dansville with human personality. Her Maltese cat at Glen Echo she accredited with _reasoning_ powers, with a _logical_ mind. Of Maltese Tommie she tells this story. Tommie saw another cat in the mirror. He stared at it; moved his head in rapid succession to one side of the mirror, then to the other side. The other cat did likewise. He dashed like mad to the back of the mirror, but found no cat. Returning to the front of the mirror, he put his left paw on the glass; the right paw of the other cat responded. He put his right paw on the glass; the left paw of the other cat met his. He again put his left paw on the glass, this time being close to the edge of the mirror and, continuing to hold it there he reached around to the back of the mirror with his right paw to grab the insolent intruder. Not seeing the other cat, as he quickly glanced around the edge of the mirror, and not having found it with his right paw, “he wiser grew” and walked away philosophizing;—in this vain world—

Things are not what they seem—but then, A pleasant illusion is better than a harsh reality.

The picture of Maltese Tommie, painted by Antoinette Margot, is still one of the historic art-treasures on the walls of the Clara Barton Glen Echo home.

Those who think of Clara Barton only as the “war woman” within the battle smoke, or on the rostrum addressing literary audiences, or on state occasions as the cynosure of all eyes, or as the guest of honor among the crowned heads of Europe—as masculine and not feminine—have not seen the daily life-picture of Clara Barton. Clara Barton was most womanly when most childlike, queenliest when lowliest and, like the Roman Matron, most aristocratic when most domestic.

As Divinity lives in all life, as God the first garden made and work was the best religion Clara Barton had, her applied religion was in the yard as she cared for the domestic animals; in the garden as she cared for the shrubs, the flowers, the vegetables, her special pride being in raising fine strawberries. Frequently was Miss Barton called from the yard or garden, to meet guests in her “House of Rough Hemlock Boards,”—there where was welcome ever royal and farewell went out loyal; there where—

Honest offered courtesy Which oft is sooner found in lowly sheds With smoky rafters than in tapestry halls And courts of princes, where it first was named And yet is most pretended.

XXXVII

Of the women writers that lived at the time of the Civil War the mind of Harriet Beecher Stowe was the most imaginative; “the vehicle of thought” used by Clara Barton, the best equipped, the most powerful. In war-literature Mrs. Stowe will live through the genius of her great novel; Clara Barton, through her descriptive powers, forceful diction, and patriotic sayings. THE AUTHOR.

Learn to be good readers. CARLYLE.

God be thanked for books. CHANNING.

Mankind are creatures of books, as well of other circumstances.

LEIGH HUNT.

The true university of these days is a collection of books.

HERO AND HERO WORSHIPPERS.

Reading to the mind is what exercise is to the body. ADDISON.

Books that are books are all that you want, and there are but half-a-dozen in a thousand. THOREAU.

Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. FULLER.

Read much, but not many books. SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON.

When a new book appears, read an old one.

ENGLISH APHORISM.

Old wood to burn, old wine to drink. Old friends to trust, old books to read. ALONZO of Arragon.

Miss Barton would not rewrite a public address; on looking it over, not a sentence, not a word, could be improved by changing.

J. B. HUBBELL, Assistant to Clara Barton.

She who desires information can sit down, read, and obtain it.

CLARA BARTON.

Persons who use their brains, tongues and pens for the improvement of their kind, are those of whom biographies may profitably be written. CLARA BARTON.

Miss Barton is in the front rank of American lecturers—excelled by none. AURORA BEACON.

The Secretary to President McKinley used to say that in his correspondence at the White House the letters of Clara Barton excelled all others in literary merit. THE AUTHOR.

Clara Barton’s lecture is beautifully written. JOHN B. GOUGH.

CLARA BARTON IN THE LITERARY FIELD

The treasure-house of the world is of books. Books are one’s chosen friends, and friends are of souls with like aspirations. From the contents of books character is made. The legacy in books is what youth bequeaths to maturity. In youth Clara Barton entered the “true university,” that of books. She read not only books from the shelf but found “books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.” Her favorite authors were Shakespeare, Longfellow, Milton, Keats, Schiller, Bunyan, Tennyson, Scott and Browning.

Had she followed the promptings of her head, and not her heart, Clara Barton might have been a Mrs. Sigourney. One of her admirers says that, had she been an author, “her gracefulness of expression, her buoyancy of thought, and brilliancy of imagery” would have placed her in a class with Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, and Charlotte Brontë. But Clara Barton is now in a class—in a class by herself—and throughout the future the student of humanity will study Clara Barton.

Clara Barton’s descriptions of battle, and other, scenes are surpassing in vividness—unequalled. In her diaries, which she kept for more than half-a-century, are nuggets of human wisdom. Her wise sayings, as those of Benjamin Franklin, would fill a volume. Such Clara Barton Red Cross maxims, and other wise sayings as appear in these pages, are but the flotsam and jetsam of a cargo of writings, the cargo partly wrecked and no part of it available by the author.

Clara Barton was a nurse, but only as Lincoln was a rail-splitter. As an executive, Clara Barton is accredited as the greatest _man_ in America, by one of America’s greatest statesmen; as the greatest woman in the world, by one of America’s greatest generals; as having done more for humanity than any other woman since the time of Mary of Galilee, by a great State Executive. By a great writer, it is said that through reading everything is within one’s reach. Clara Barton’s mental reach into national and world problems at least widens and heightens the possibilities of womankind.

Her Red Cross lectures are not “Caudle Lectures to Ladies”; they, including official reports, are high-class state papers which would do credit to the White House—literary, argumentative, statesmanlike. For twenty-three years in America Clara Barton was the Red Cross encyclopedia, the Red Cross dictionary. She was also the Red Cross legislature, the Red Cross Supreme Court, the Commander-in-Chief of our Red Cross battalions, at home and abroad. Although one of the “remonstrants,” in the press, referred to the Red Cross as “Clara Barton’s Bread and Butter Brigade” the Achilles in that brigade had won for humanity the greatest battle on American soil.

Her address, “History of the Red Cross; Its Origin and Progress,” is all comprehensive, showing research, scholarship, logic. Her “Address to the President, Congress and People of the United States” on “The Red Cross—A History of This Remarkable Movement in the Interest of Humanity” is as overwhelmingly convincing, as to the necessity of adhesion by this Government to the Treaty of Geneva, as was Webster’s historic reply to Hayne, in advocacy of the perpetuity of the Union. Her address on “What is the Significance of the Red Cross in its Relation to Philanthropy” is hardly less meritorious. Her address at Saratoga on “International and National Relief in War” is more than a literary gem; it is a compendium of humanitarian history—of Red Cross philosophy. No similar humanitarian address even approximates it, in wisdom and argument.

Through seven years, in the field of letters and politics, there raged a war against woe, a war led by a Master Spirit. Humanity won—won through that Master Spirit. That Master Literary Spirit, says another great woman, has “won the hearts of the women of the world.” She not only “walked like a benediction of her God amid the desolate, the stricken, the hungry and despairing,” but she walked and talked and lived “in pulses stirred to generosity.” Her pathos of sentiment and elegance of diction won the hearts of the American people, won Congress, won the President, won the Red Cross for America. And “the Red Cross in its great and human principles, its far-reaching philanthropy, its innovations upon long established and accepted customs and rules of barbaric cruelty, its wise practical charity, stands forever next to the immortal proclamation of freedom to the slaves that crowns the name of Abraham Lincoln.”

REPRESENTATIVE OF THE LITERARY WORLD

_The Fra_—Elbert and Alice Hubbard.

XXXVIII

Clara Barton’s dress was so simple that no one tried to follow her fashion. ALICE HUBBARD.

For personal adornment Clara Barton cared little, choosing green dresses in her youth; and ornaments of bright red, for cheer, in her older years. CORRA BACON-FOSTER, Author.

Dress changes manners. VOLTAIRE.

Eat to please thyself, but dress to please others. FRANKLIN.

Ridiculous modes, invented by ignorance, and adopted by folly.

SMOLLETT.

To live to dress well indicates a fool. DR. A. E. WINSHIP.

The plainer the dress with greater luster does beauty appear.

LORD FAIRFAX.

Beauty, like truth, never is so glorious as when it goes plainest.

STERNE.

Those who think that, in order to dress well, it is necessary to dress extravagantly, make a great mistake. Nothing so well becomes feminine beauty as simplicity. GEORGE D. PRENTICE.

A plain, genteel dress is more admired and obtains more credit than lace and embroidery, in the eyes of the judicious and sensible.

GEORGE WASHINGTON.

Elizabeth, who died the happy owner of 3,000 dresses, issued a solemn proclamation against extravagance in dress.

GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.

loveliness Needs not foreign aid of ornament, But is, when unadorned, adorned most. THOMSON—_Autumn_.

We sacrifice to dress till household joys and comforts cease. Dress drains our cellar dry and keeps our larder lean. COWPER.

The dress that shows taste and sentiment is elevating to the home, and is one of the most feminine means of beautifying the world.

MISS OAKEY.

A lady of genius will give a genteel air to her whole dress by a well fancied suit of knots, as a judicious writer gives to a whole sentence by a single expression. GAY.

A rich dress is not worth a straw to one who has a poor mind.

AZ ZUBAIDI.

’Tis the mind that makes the body rich. SHAKESPEARE.

I wear what I want to. CLARA BARTON.

THE ART OF DRESSING—CLARA BARTON’S INDIVIDUALITY

Dress is a sentiment, sentiment of an occasion. Dress is an expression of the attitude of the mind as to propriety, necessary to accomplish results. Like smiles, dress is an expression of the intelligence of the wearer. Dress is an art, one of the highest of the arts. Dress has to do with the form divine and, whether dress be for good or ill, depends on the mind that fashions it. Court dress, then the want of _dress_, Clara Barton disliked and on one occasion would not conform. She thereby missed the honor of being a guest on a state occasion—proffered her by the world’s greatest queen.

There is an individuality of dress, as of conduct. Clara Barton had individuality. There has been no one else like her, and a famous American woman says we shall never again produce her like. In religion she adhered to no creed; in social life, to no rules; in wearing apparel, to no fashion. In service to the world she wished for something to do that no one else would do—something that no one else thought of doing. “Clara Barton was Clara Barton,” individual even in her wearing apparel. The first straw bonnet she ever had she made herself. She cut the green rye; she scalded it; she bleached it in the sun; she cut it into lengths; with her teeth she split the straws into strands, flattening them. She braided the bonnet by the use of eleven strands; she fashioned it to suit herself; she wore it; it was Clara’s individual bonnet, and at 86 years of age she regarded it the great achievement of her life.

When advised by a clerk in a store that a woman of her age should wear lavenders and violets, Clara Barton turned to her shopping companion and said, “I guess she doesn’t know I wear what I want to.” While on the lecture platform, to a limited extent, she conformed to custom and wore trains. On a certain occasion, looking her over from head to feet, an obtrusive flatterer said to her “How stunning!” Floating on a breeze several degrees below zero came from Miss Barton’s lips “_What did you say!_” Nor would she gossip about the dress of others. Says Goethe: The “highest fortune of earth’s children is personality.” Characteristic of her observations on personality rather than of dress, on an occasion when she was a special guest of honor, she thus writes of her hostess: “I want you to know what a beautiful, bright lady I think Mrs. President Hayes to be. She is brilliant and beautiful, brunette with abundant jet black hair, put back over her ears;—she is entirely different from the Grand Duchess of Baden, and still _bright_ and _full of life_, like her.”

Every human being dresses for effect, as does the actress before the footlights—the greater the intelligence the greater the discrimination. Clara Barton was the designer of her own fashions, the mistress of her own stitches. In the use of one of her stitches, she taught the women of Corsica to do more work in one hour than previously they had done in five hours. She found forty thousand people in despair, ill clothed. In her “dress-making shop,” she taught large classes of girls to sew. Daily, with these poor girls,

Plying her needle and thread,— Stitch! Stitch! Stitch!

she left those people the best clothed people in Europe.

Clara Barton was as proud of her skill with the needle as was Lucretia with the spinning wheel, or Florence Nightingale in the art of nursing. In a western town a lady was discredited, and shunned, because she had been a sewing girl. Appreciating the situation, and ambitious socially, she made her home the center of fashionable sewing circles. She taught fancy crochet, and embroidery stitches; in a very short time she had the aristocratic women at her feet, and became the social leader.

The bright little needle, the swift-flying needle, The needle directed by beauty and art.

Clara Barton’s apparel was her personal care, and not the care of a _modiste_. While in charge of relief work on a field of disaster, she said I have no clothing, and couldn’t attend to it if I had.” She fully appreciated also that “rags are royal raiment when worn for virtue’s sake.” She would sew on her own buttons, mend, clean, stitch and hemstitch, make and remake, her own clothes,—not only as a matter of economy but as a matter of personal pride.

Clara Barton received no one until she had donned the, to her, becoming apparel,—the proper bow at the neck, the proper bow in her hair. Everything about her dress must be, to her, _au fait_. Propriety of dress had been a part of her education. She recognized that a tramp seldom gets by the barking dog at the gate, while the door of the palace opens wide to the person well-dressed. And possibly also she entertained the sentiment of Emerson, “The sense of being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity which religion is powerless to bestow.” She agreed with Walt Whitman that only personal qualities endure, and dress bespeaks personal qualities.

That she succeeded in the art of dress—that her personal qualities were at all times in the ascendancy, is attested by the fact that the press reporter overlooked her dress, in describing the “ladies’ costumes.” He would describe her very dark, bright eyes, her face as the ideal one which conforms to her character, her raven black hair worn in the fashion of our mothers and grandmothers; or “her hair, black as the raven’s wing, does not follow fashion’s ways but is dressed like Longfellow’s Evangeline, low down on either side of her forehead,” and then possibly dismiss her with the simple statement: “Miss Barton was attired in black silk.”

XXXIX

Clara Barton—her brilliancy and bravery won her a European reputation; she was decorated with several honorary orders in recognition of her exploits. Raleigh (N. C.) _Times_.

The whole of Europe is marshaled under the banner of the Red Cross. CLARA BARTON.

In the Grand Duchy of Baden, woman leads in Red Cross work.

CLARA BARTON.

Scarcely had man made his first move in organizing the Red Cross, when the jeweled hand of royal woman glistened behind him, and right royally she has done her part. CLARA BARTON.

Sovereigns deeply interested in the work of the Red Cross will be less and less disposed to precipitate their peoples into war for light and trivial causes, for small, or personal, or unworthy ends.

CLARA BARTON.

The patrons of the Red Cross in Europe are always of the Crown, or royal families, as Empress Augusta of Germany, Victoria of England, Dagmar of Russia, Marguerite of Italy, and the Royal Grand Duchess of Baden. CLARA BARTON.

THE JEWELLED HAND AND THE HARD HAND MEET

In the Franco-Prussian War the jeweled hand of the princess and the hard hand of the peasant met, and labored side by side unquestioned and unquestioning in their God-given mission. Side by side they wrought, says Clara Barton, as side by side their dead lay on the battlefield.

Empress Augusta became the active head of the Red Cross Society of Germany. Luise, Grand Duchess of Baden, only daughter of the Emperor and Empress of Germany, was untiring in the conduct of the Society she had already formed and patronized. Her many beautiful castles, with their magnificent grounds throughout all Baden were at once transformed into military hospitals. The whole court with herself at its head formed into a committee of superintendents an organization for the relief of the wounded soldiers. Clara Barton was the leading spirit in all such relief work. She says: “I have seen a wounded Arab from the French Armies, who knew no word of any language but his own, stretch out his arms to my friend, the Grand Duchess, in adoration and blessing as she passed by.”

XL

Clara Barton—The object of decorations by many sovereigns.

Tacoma (Wash.) _Ledger_.

Clara Barton—The rulers of many nations have done her honor.

Boston (Mass.) _Herald_.

The title of Emperor never loses itself. NAPOLEON.

A throne is but of wood, covered with velvet. NAPOLEON.

Royalty is no longer the feeling of the age. NAPOLEON.

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. SHAKESPEARE.

Every monarch is subject to a mightier one. SENECA.

The name of Emperor is a word, like another; but he who bears it must have a better title to render him worthy of posterity.

NAPOLEON.

Clara Barton was the welcome guest in the soldiers’ camp, the woodman’s hut, and the palace of the king.

_Universal Leader_, Boston, Mass.

Clara Barton’s services in the Franco-Prussian War brought her recognition from the German Emperor in the shape of an iron cross, Germany’s most prized decoration.

Bridgeport (Conn.) _Post_.

The “little woman” accomplished what crowned heads failed in.

_Unity_—Chicago.

Germany, which was in the vanguard of treaty nations was thoroughly organized and equipped. She was the first to demonstrate the true idea of the Red Cross—people’s aid for national, for military, necessity. CLARA BARTON.

His Majesty, in the name of humanity, was glad to meet and welcome those who labored for it. CLARA BARTON.

CLARA BARTON AND THE EMPEROR

The royalty of Germany had assembled to speed the parting guest, to pay tribute of respect to the “little lady” who had sacrificed herself for the sick and wounded in the Franco-Prussian war. William the First was there. The Emperor observed, among her many decorations, two decorations worn on that occasion by the “little lady.” One of these had been presented to her by His Majesty on his 75th birthday; the other, the “Warrior Brothers in Arms” of Milwaukee, he had not seen. It was the “Iron Cross of Germany,” on an American shield. The “American Eagle” surmounted the arms for defence; and the colors of Germany—the Red, White, and Black, of the Empire,—united the two.

The Emperor, with much curiosity, turned to his daughter, the Grand Duchess, as if to ask “does my daughter understand this?” His daughter’s explanation was satisfactory, whereupon the Emperor expressed the wish to know whether or not the Germans make good American citizens. “The best that could be desired,” responded the “little lady,”—“industrious, honest, and prosperous.”

The Emperor then commented on the high compliment thus paid the German-Americans; “I am glad to hear this; they were good soldiers and, thank God, they are true men everywhere.”

In a personal sense the Emperor said: “Of myself, I am nothing. God be praised; it is all from Him. I am only His. He made us what we are. God is over all.”

Miss Barton, “this is probably the _last_ time; we may not meet again in this world, but we will be sure to meet in the world beyond. Good-bye.”

Farewell! if ever fondest prayer For others availed on high Mine will not all be lost in air, But waft thy name beyond the sky.