not many days before the little girls and the great
St. Bernard had made friends of all the passengers who were able to be on
deck.

The hours are long at sea, and people gladly welcome anything that
provides entertainment, so Lloyd and Betty were often called aside as they
walked, and invited to join some group, and tell to a knot of interested
listeners all they knew of Hero and the Major, and the training of the
French ambulance dogs.

In return Lloyd's stories nearly always called forth some anecdote from
her listeners about the Red Cross work in America, and to her great
surprise she found five persons among them who had met Clara Barton in
some great national calamity of fire, flood, or pestilence.

One was a portly man with a gruff voice, who had passed through the
experiences of the forest fires that swept through Michigan, over twenty
years ago. As he told his story, he made the scenes so real that the
children forgot where they were. They could almost smell the thick,
stifling smoke of the burning forest, hear the terrible crackling of the
flames, feel the scorching heat in their faces, and see the frightened
cattle driven into the lakes and streams by the pursuing fire.

They listened with startled eyes as he described the wall of flame,
hemming in the peaceful home where his little son played around the
door-step. They held their breath while he told of their mad flight from
it, when, lashing his horses into a gallop, he looked back to see it
licking up everything in the world he held dear except the frightened
little family huddled at his feet. He had worked hard to build the
cottage. It was furnished with family heirlooms brought West with them
from the old homestead in Vermont. It was hard to see those great red
tongues devouring it in a mouthful.

In the morning, although they had reached a place of safety, they were out
in a charred, blackened wilderness, without a roof to shelter them, a
chair to sit on, or a crust to eat. "The hardest thing to bear," he said,
"was to hear my little three-year-old Bertie begging for his breakfast,
and to know that there was nothing within miles of us to satisfy his
hunger, and that the next day it would be the same, and the next, and the
next.

"We were powerless to help ourselves. But while we sat there in utter
despair, a neighbour rode by and hailed us. He told us that Red Cross
committees had started out from Milwaukee and Chicago at first tidings of
the fir