ok a
soldier's pride in keeping her quarters straight.

Hanging on the wall between her bedroom and private sitting-room was a
small mirror into which her mother looked when she came home as a
bride.

Her bed was small and hard. Near it were the books that meant so much
to her--the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress, the stories of Sarah Orne
Jewett, the poems of Lucy Larcom, and many other well-worn, much-read
classics.

That she was still feminine, as in the days of girlhood when she
fashioned her first straw bonnet, so now she was fond of wearing
handsome gowns, often with trains. Lavender, royal purple, and wine
color were the shades she liked best to wear, and in which her friends
most often remember her. Despite her few extravagant tastes, Clara
Barton was the most democratic woman America ever produced, as well as
the most humane. She loved people, sick and well, and in any State and
city of the Union she could claim personal friends in every walk of
life.

When, after ninety-nine years of life and fifty of continuous service
to suffering human nature, death laid its hand upon her on that spring
day, the world to its remotest corner stopped its busy barter and
trade for a brief moment to pay reverent tribute to a woman, who was
by nature of the most retiring, bashful disposition, and yet carried
on her life-work in the face of the enemy, to the sound of cannon, and
close to the firing-line. She was on the firing-line all her life.
That is her life story.

Her "boys" of all ages adored her, and no more touching incident is
told of her than that of a day in Boston, when, after a meeting, she
lingered at its close to chat with General Shafter. Suddenly the great
audience, composed entirely of old soldiers, rose to their feet as she
came down the aisle, and a voice cried:

"Three cheers for Clara Barton!"

They were given by voices hoarse with feeling. Then some one shouted:

"Tiger!"

Before it could be given another voice cried:

"No! _Sweetheart!_"

Then those grizzled elderly men whose lives she had helped to save
broke into uproar and tears together, while the little bent woman
smiled back at them with a love as true as any sweetheart's.

* * * * *

To-day we stand at the parting of the ways. Our nation is in the
making as a world power, and in its rebirth there must needs be
bloodshed and scalding tears. As we American girls and women go out
bravely to face the untried f