clothes.'

"I tell you it made a lump come up in my throat to see that the little
fellow had taken his very best to pay his debt of gratitude. Nothing was
too great for him to sacrifice. Even his tin soldiers went when he
remembered what the Red Cross had done for him."

"My experience with the Red Cross was in the Mississippi floods of '82,"
said a gentleman who had joined the party. "One winter day we were
attracted by screams out in the river, and found that they came from some
people who were floating down on a house that had been washed away. There
they were, that freezing weather, out in the middle of the river, their
clothes frozen on them, ill from fright and exposure. I went out in one of
the boats that was sent to their rescue, and helped bring them to shore.
I was so impressed by the tales of suffering they told that I went up the
river to investigate.

"At every town, and nearly every steamboat landing, I found men from the
relief committees already at work, distributing supplies. They didn't stop
when they had provided food and clothing. They furnished seed by the
car-load to the farmers, just as in the Galveston disaster, a few years
ago, they furnished thousands of strawberry plants to the people who were
wholly dependent on their crops for their next year's food."

"Where did they get all those stores?" asked Lloyd. "And the seeds and the
strawberry plants?"

"Most of it was donated," answered the gentleman. "Many contributions come
pouring in after such a disaster, just as little Bertie's did. But the
society is busy all the time, collecting and storing away the things that
may be needed at a moment's notice. People would contribute, of course,
even if there were no society to take charge of their donations, but
without its wise hands to distribute, much would be lost.

"A number of years ago a physician in Bedford, Indiana, gave a tract of
land to the American National Red Cross; more than a square mile, I
believe, a beautiful farm with buildings and fruit-trees, a place where
material can be accumulated and stored. By the terms of the treaty of
Geneva, forty nations are pledged to hold it sacred for ever against all
invading armies, to the use of the Red Cross. It is the only spot on earth
pledged to perpetual peace."

It was from a sad-faced lady in black, who had had two sons drowned in the
Johnstown flood, that Lloyd and Betty heard the description of Clara
Barton's five months' labour ther