Part 3

Mr. Durant had longed to find just such a person to build on the foundation he had laid. It was in her first year that he pointed her out to one of the trustees.

"Do you see that little dark-eyed girl? She will be the next president of Wellesley," he said.

"Surely she is much too young and inexperienced for such a responsibility," protested the other, looking at him in amazement.

"As for the first, it is a fault we easily outgrow," said Mr. Durant, dryly, "and as for her inexperience--well, I invite you to visit one of her classes."

The next year, on the death of Mr. Durant, she was made acting president of the college, and the year following she inherited the title and honors, as well as the responsibilities and opportunities, of the office. The Princess had come into her kingdom.

The election caused a great stir among the students, particularly the irrepressible seniors. It was wonderful and most inspiring that their splendid Miss Freeman, who was the youngest member of the faculty, should have won this honor. "Why, she was only a girl like themselves! The time of strict observances and tiresome regulations of every sort was at an end. Miss Freeman seemed to sense the prevailing mood, and, without waiting for a formal assembly, asked the seniors to meet her in her rooms. In they poured, overflowing chairs, tables, and ranging themselves about on the floor in animated, expectant groups. The new head of the college looked at them quietly for a minute before she began to speak.

"I have sent for you seniors," she said at last seriously, "to ask your advice. You may have heard that I have been called to the position of acting president of your college. I am, of course, too young; and the duties are, as you know, too heavy for the strongest to carry alone. If I must manage alone, there is only one course--to decline. It has, however, occurred to me that my seniors might be willing to help by looking after the order of the college and leaving me free for administration. Shall I accept? Shall we work things out together?"

The hearty response made it clear that the princess was to rule not only by "divine right," but also by the glad "consent of the governed." Perhaps it was her youth and charm and the romance of her brilliant success that won for her the affectionate title of "The Princess"; perhaps it was her undisputed sway in her kingdom of girls. It was said that her radiant, "outgoing spirit" was felt in the atmosphere of the place and in all the graduates. Her spirit became the Wellesley spirit.

"What did she do besides turning all of you into an adoring band of Freeman-followers?" a Wellesley woman was asked.

The reply came without a moment's hesitation: "She had the life-giving power of a true creator, one who can entertain a vision of the ideal, and then work patiently bit by bit to 'carve it in the marble real.' She built the Wellesley we all know and love, making it practical, constructive, fine, generous, human, spiritual."

For six years the Princess of Wellesley ruled her kingdom wisely. She raised the standard of work, enlisted the interest and support of those in a position to help, added to the buildings and equipment, and won the enthusiastic cooperation of students, faculty, and public. Then, one day, she voluntarily stepped down from her throne, leaving others to go on with the work she had begun. She married Professor George Herbert Palmer of Harvard, and, (quite in the manner of the fairy-tale) "lived happily ever after."

"What a disappointment!" some of her friends said. "That a woman of such unusual powers and gifts should deliberately leave a place of large usefulness and influence to shut herself up in the concerns of a single home!"

"There is nothing better than the making of a true home," said Alice Freeman Palmer. "I shall not be shut away from the concerns of others, but more truly a part of them. 'For love is fellow-service,' I believe."

The home near Harvard Yard was soon felt to be the most free and perfect expression of her generous nature. Its happiness made all life seem happier. Shy undergraduates and absorbed students who had withdrawn overmuch within themselves and their pet problems found there a thaw after their "winter of discontent." Wellesley girls--even in those days before automobiles--did not feel fifteen miles too great a distance to go for a cup of tea and a half-hour by the fire.

Many were surprised that Mrs. Palmer never seemed worn by the unstinted giving of herself to the demands of others on her time and sympathy. The reason was that their interests were her interests. Her spirit was indeed "outgoing"; there was no wall hedging in a certain number of things and people as hers, with the rest of the world outside. As we have seen, people counted with her supremely; and the ideas which moved her were those which she found embodied in the joys and sorrows of human hearts.

Mrs. Palmer wrote of her days at this time:

I don't know what will happen if life keeps on growing so much better and brighter each year. How does your cup manage to hold so much? Mine is running over, and I keep getting larger cups; but I can't contain all my blessings and gladness. We are both so well and busy that the days are never half long enough.

Life held, indeed, a full measure of opportunities for service. Wellesley claimed her as a member of its executive committee, and other colleges sought her counsel. When Chicago University was founded, she was induced to serve as its Dean of Women until the opportunities for girls there were wisely established. She worked energetically raising funds for Radcliffe and her own Wellesley. Throughout the country her wisdom as an educational expert was recognized, and her advice sought in matters of organization and administration. For several years, as a member of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, she worked early and late to improve the efficiency and influence of the normal schools. She was a public servant who brought into all her contact with groups and masses of people the simple directness and intimate charm that marked her touch with individuals.

"How is it that you are able to do so much more than other people?" asked a tired, nervous woman, who stopped Mrs. Palmer for a word at the close of one of her lectures.

"Because," she answered, with the sudden gleam of a smile, "I haven't any nerves nor any conscience, and my husband says I haven't any backbone."

It was true that she never worried. She had early learned to live one day at a time, without "looking before and after." And nobody knew better than Mrs. Palmer the renewing power of joy. She could romp with some of her very small friends in the half-hour before an important meeting; go for a long walk or ride along country lanes when a vexing problem confronted her; or spend a quiet evening by the fire reading aloud from one of her favorite poets at the end of a busy day.

For fifteen years Mrs. Palmer lived this life of joyful, untiring service. Then, at the time of her greatest power and usefulness, she died. The news came as a personal loss to thousands. Just as Wellesley had mourned her removal to Cambridge, so a larger world mourned her earthly passing. But her friends soon found that it was impossible to grieve or to feel for a moment that she was dead. The echoes of her life were living echoes in the world of those who knew her.

There are many memorials speaking in different places of her work. In the chapel at Wellesley, where it seems to gather at every hour a golden glory of light, is the lovely transparent marble by Daniel Chester French, eternally bearing witness to the meaning of her influence with her girls. In the tower at Chicago the chimes "make music, joyfully to recall," her labors there. But more lasting than marble or bronze is the living memorial in the hearts and minds "made better by her presence." For it is, indeed, people that count, and in the richer lives of many the enkindling spirit of Alice Freeman Palmer still lives.

OUR LADY OF THE RED CROSS: CLARA BARTON

Who gives himself with his alms feeds three,-- Himself, his hungering neighbor, and Me.

"The Vision of Sir Launfal."--LOWELL.

OUR LADY OF THE RED CROSS

"A Christmas baby! Now isn't that the best kind of a Christmas gift for us all?" cried Captain Stephen Barton, who took the interesting flannel bundle from the nurse's arms and held it out proudly to the assembled family.

No longed-for heir to a waiting kingdom could have received a more royal welcome than did that little girl who appeared at the Barton home in Oxford, Massachusetts, on Christmas Day, 1821. Ten years had passed since a child had come to the comfortable farm-house, and the four big brothers and sisters were very sure that they could not have had a more precious gift than this Christmas baby. No one doubted that she deserved a distinguished name, but it was due to Sister Dorothy, who was a young lady of romantic seventeen and something of a reader, that she was called Clarissa Harlowe, after a well-known heroine of fiction. The name which this heroine of real life actually bore and made famous, however, was Clara Barton; for the Christmas baby proved to be a gift not only to a little group of loving friends, but also to a great nation and to humanity.

The sisters and brothers were teachers rather than playmates for Clara, and her education began so early that she had no recollection of the way they led her toddling steps through the beginnings of book-learning. On her first day at school she announced to the amazed teacher who tried to put a primer into her hands that she could spell the "artichoke words." The teacher had other surprises besides the discovery that this mite of three was acquainted with three-syllabled lore.

Brother Stephen, who was a wizard with figures, had made the sums with which he covered her slate seem a fascinating sort of play at a period when most infants are content with counting the fingers of one hand. All other interests, however, paled before the stories that her father told her of great men and their splendid deeds.

Captain Barton was amused one day at the discovery that his precocious daughter, who always eagerly encored his tales of conquerors and leaders, thought of their greatness in images of quite literal and realistic bigness. A president must, for instance, be as large as a house, and a vice-president as spacious as a barn door at the very least. But these somewhat crude conceptions did not put a check on the epic recitals of the retired officer, who, in the intervals of active service in plowed fields or in pastures where his thoroughbreds grazed with their mettlesome colts, liked to live over the days when he served under "Mad Anthony" Wayne in the Revolutionary War, and had a share in the thrilling adventures of the Western frontier.

Clara was only five years old when Brother David taught her to ride. "Learning to ride is just learning a horse," said this daring youth, who was the "Buffalo Bill" of the surrounding country.

"How can I learn a horse, David?" quavered the child, as the high-spirited animals came whinnying to the pasture bars at her brother's call.

"Catch hold of his mane, Clara, and just feel the horse a part of yourself--the big half for the time being," said David, as he put her on the back of a colt that was broken only to bit and halter, and, easily springing on his favorite, held the reins of both in one hand, while he steadied the small sister with the other by seizing hold of one excited foot.

They went over the fields at a gallop that first day, and soon little Clara and her mount understood each other so well that her riding feats became almost as far-famed as those of her brother. The time came when her skill and confidence on horseback--her power to feel the animal she rode a part of herself and keep her place in any sort of saddle through night-long gallops--meant the saving of many lives.

David taught her many other practical things that helped to make her steady and self-reliant in the face of emergencies. She learned, for instance, to drive a nail straight, and to tie a knot that would hold. Eye and hand were trained to work together with quick decision that made for readiness and efficiency in dealing with a situation, whether it meant the packing of a box, or first-aid measures after an accident on the skating-pond.

She was always an outdoor child, with dogs, horses, and ducks for playfellows. The fuzzy ducklings were the best sort of dolls. Sometimes when wild ducks visited the pond and all her waddling favorites began to flap their wings excitedly, it seemed that her young heart felt, too, the call of large, free spaces.

"The only real fun is to do things," she used to say.

She rode after the cows, helped in the milking and churning, and followed her father about, dropping potatoes in their holes or helping weed the garden. Once, when the house was being painted, she begged to be allowed to assist in the work, even learning to grind the pigments and mix the colors. The family was at first amused and then amazed at the persistency of her application as day after day she donned her apron and fell to work.

They were not less astonished when she wanted to learn the work of the weavers in her brothers' satinet mills. At first, her mother refused this extraordinary request; but Stephen, who understood the intensity of her craving to do things, took her part; and at the end of her first week at the flying shuttle Clara had the satisfaction of finding that her cloth was passed as first-quality goods. Her career as a weaver was of short duration, however, owing to a fire which destroyed the mills.

The young girl was as enthusiastic in play as at work. Whether it was a canter over the fields on Billy while her dog, Button, dashed along at her side, his curly white tail bobbing ecstatically, or a coast down the rolling hills in winter, she entered into the sport of the moment with her whole heart.

When there was no outlet for her superabundant energy, she was genuinely unhappy. Then it was that a self-consciousness and morbid sensitiveness became so evident that it was a source of real concern to her friends.

"People say that I must have been born brave," said Clara Barton. "Why, I seem to remember nothing but terrors in my early days. I was a shrinking little bundle of fears--fears of thunder, fears of strange faces, fears of my strange self." It was only when thought and feeling were merged in the zest of some interesting activity that she lost her painful shyness and found herself.

When she was eleven years old she had her first experience as a nurse. A fall which gave David a serious blow on the head, together with the bungling ministrations of doctors, who, when in doubt, had recourse only to the heroic treatment of bleeding and leeches, brought the vigorous young brother to a protracted invalidism. For two years Clara was his constant and devoted attendant. She schooled herself to remain calm, cheerful, and resourceful in the presence of suffering and exacting demands. When others gave way to fatigue or "nerves," her wonderful instinct for action kept her, child though she was, at her post. Her sympathy expressed itself in untiring service.

In the years that followed her brother's recovery Clara became a real problem to herself and her friends. The old blighting sensitiveness made her school-days restless and unhappy in spite of her alert mind and many interests.

At length her mother, at her wit's end because of this baffling, morbid strain in her remarkable daughter, was advised by a man of sane judgment and considerable understanding of child nature, to throw responsibility upon her and give her a school to teach.

It happened, therefore, that when Clara Barton was fifteen she "put down her skirts, put up her hair," and entered upon her successful career as a teacher. She liked the children and believed in them, entering enthusiastically into their concerns, and opening the way to new interests. When asked how she managed the discipline of the troublesome ones, she said, "The children give no trouble; I never have to discipline at all," quite unconscious of the fact that her vital influence gave her a control that made assertion of authority unnecessary.

"When the boys found that I was as strong as they were and could teach them something on the playground, they thought that perhaps we might discover together a few other worth-while things in school hours," she said.

For eighteen years Clara Barton was a teacher. Always learning herself while teaching others, she decided in 1852 to enter Clinton Liberal Institute in New York as a pupil for graduation, for there was then no college whose doors were open to women. When she had all that the Institute could give her, she looked about for new fields for effort.

In Bordentown, New Jersey, she found there was a peculiar need for some one who would bring to her task pioneer zeal as well as the passion for teaching. At that time there were no public schools in the town or, indeed, in the State.

"The people who pose as respectable are too proud and too prejudiced to send their boys and girls to a free pauper school, and in the meantime all the children run wild," Miss Barton was told.

"We have tried again and again," said a discouraged young pedagogue. "It is impossible to do anything in this place."

"Give me three months, and I will teach free," said Clara Barton.

This was just the sort of challenge she loved. There was something to be done. She began with six unpromising gamins in a dilapidated, empty building. In a month her quarters proved too narrow. Each youngster became an enthusiastic and effectual advertisement. As always, her success lay in an understanding of her pupils as individuals, and a quickening interest that brought out the latent possibilities of each. The school of six grew in a year to one of six hundred, and the thoroughly converted citizens built an eight-room school-house where Miss Barton remained as principal and teacher until a breakdown of her voice made a complete rest necessary.

The weak throat soon made it evident that her teaching days were over; but she found at the same time in Washington, where she had gone for recuperation, a new work.

"Living is doing," she said. "Even while we say there is nothing we can do, we stumble over the opportunities for service that we are passing by in our tear-blinded self-pity."

The over-sensitive girl had learned her lesson well. Life offered moment by moment too many chances for action for a single worker to turn aside to bemoan his own particular condition.

The retired teacher became a confidential secretary in the office of the Commissioner of Patents. Great confusion existed in the Patent Office at that time because some clerks had betrayed the secrets of certain inventions. Miss Barton was the first woman to be employed in a Government department; and while ably handling the critical situation that called for all her energy and resourcefulness, she had to cope not only with the scarcely veiled enmity of those fellow-workers who were guilty or jealous, but also with the open antagonism of the rank and file of the clerks, who were indignant because a woman had been placed in a position of responsibility and influence. She endured covert slander and deliberate disrespect, letting her character and the quality of her work speak for themselves. They spoke so eloquently that when a change in political control caused her removal, she was before long recalled to straighten out the tangle that had ensued.

At the outbreak of the Civil War Miss Barton was, therefore, at the very storm-center.

The early days of the conflict found her binding up the wounds of the Massachusetts boys who had been attacked by a mob while passing through Baltimore, and who for a time were quartered in the Capitol. Some of these recruits were boys from Miss Barton's own town who had been her pupils, and all were dear to her because they were offering their lives for the Union. We find her with other volunteer nurses caring for the injured, feeding groups who gathered about her in the Senate Chamber, and, from the desk of the President of the Senate, reading them the home news from the Worcester papers.

Meeting the needs as they presented themselves in that time of general panic and distress, she sent to the Worcester "Spy" appeals for money and supplies. Other papers took up the work, and soon Miss Barton had to secure space in a large warehouse to hold the provisions that poured in.

Not for many days, however, did she remain a steward of supplies. When she met the transports which brought the wounded into the city, her whole nature revolted at the sight of the untold suffering and countless deaths which were resulting from delay in caring for the injured. Her flaming ardor, her rare executive ability, and her tireless persistency won for her the confidence of those in command, and, though it was against all traditions, to say nothing of iron-clad army regulations, she obtained permission to go with her stores of food, bandages, and medicines to the firing-line, where relief might be given on the battle-field at the time of direst need. The girl who had been a "bundle of fears" had grown into the woman who braved every danger and any suffering to carry help to her fellow-countrymen.

People who spoke of her rare initiative and practical judgment had little comprehension of the absolute simplicity and directness of her methods. She managed the sulky, rebellious drivers of her army-wagons, who had little respect for orders that placed a woman in control, in the same way that she had managed children in school. Without relaxing her firmness, she spoke to them courteously, and called them to share the warm dinner she had prepared and spread out in appetizing fashion. When, after clearing away the dishes, she was sitting alone by the fire, the men returned in an awkward, self-conscious group.

"We didn't come to get warm," said their spokesman, as she kindly moved to make room for them at the flames, "we come to tell you we are ashamed. The truth is we didn't want to come. We know there is fighting ahead, and we've seen enough of that for men who don't carry muskets, only whips; and then we've never seen a train under charge of a woman before, and we couldn't understand it. We've been mean and contrary all day, and you've treated us as if we'd been the general and his staff, and given us the best meal we've had in two years. We want to ask your forgiveness, and we sha'n't trouble you again."

She found that a comfortable bed had been arranged for her in her ambulance, a lantern was hanging from the roof, and when next morning she emerged from her shelter, a steaming breakfast awaited her and a devoted corps of assistants stood ready for orders.

"I had cooked my last meal for my drivers," said Clara Barton. "These men remained with me six months through frost and snow and march and camp and battle; they nursed the sick, dressed the wounded, soothed the dying, and buried the dead; and, if possible, they grew kinder and gentler every day."