e, with car-loads of supplies, and that if we could go to the place
where they were distributing we could get whatever we needed.

"I wish you could have seen what they were handing out when we got there:
tools and lumber to put up cabins, food and beds and clothes and coal-oil.
They'd thought of everything and provided everything, and they went about
the distributing in a systematic, businesslike way that somehow put heart
and cheer into us all.

"They didn't make us feel as if they were handing out alms to paupers, but
as if they were helping some of their own family on to their feet again,
and putting them in shape to help themselves. Even my little Bertie felt
it. Young as he was, he never forgot that awful night when we fled from
the fire, nor the hungry day that followed, nor the fact that the arm that
carried him food, when he got it at last, wore a brassard marked like
that." He touched the Red Cross on Hero's collar.

"And when the chance came to show the same brotherly spirit to some one
else in trouble and pass the help along, he was as ready as the rest of us
to do his share.

"Three years afterward I read in the papers of the floods that had swept
through the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, and of the thousands that were
homeless. Bertie,--he was six then,--he listened to the account of the
children walking the streets, crying because they hadn't a roof over them
or anything to eat. He didn't say a word, but he climbed up to the mantel
and took down his little red savings-bank.

"We were pretty near on our feet again by that time, although we were
still living in a cabin. The crops had been good, and we had been able to
save a little. He poured out all the pennies and nickels in his
bank,--ninety-three cents they came to,--and then he got his only store
toy, a box of tin soldiers that had been sent to him Christmas, and put
that on the table beside the money. We didn't appear to notice what he was
doing. Presently he brought the mittens his grandmother up in Vermont had
knit for him. Then he waited a bit, and seemed to be weighing something in
his mind. By and by he slipped away to the chest where his Sunday clothes
were kept and took them out, new suit, shoes, cap and all, and laid them
on the table with the money and the tin soldiers.

"'There, daddy,' he said, 'tell the Red Cross people to send them to some
little boy like me, that's been washed out of his home and hasn't anything
of toys left, or his