om our own
societies but from the people of the country. Warehouses were filled, in
spite of all we dispensed--but there were four hundred miles of this
distress--even to Cairo, where the Ohio, sometimes thirty miles in
width, discharged its swollen waters into the Mississippi.

Recognizing this condition lower down the river as the greater need, we
transferred our supplies and distribution to Evansville, Ind. Scarcely
had we reached there when a cyclone struck the river below, and
traveling up its entire length, leveled every standing object upon its
banks, swept the houses along like cockle-shells, uprooted the greatest
trees and whirled them down its mighty current--catching here and there
its human victims, or leaving them with life only, houseless, homeless,
wringing their hands on a frozen, fireless shore--with every coal-pit
filled with water, and death from freezing more imminent than from
hunger.

There were four hundred miles more of this, and no way of reaching them
by land. With all our tons of clothing, these people and their homeless
little children were freezing. There was but one way--the Government
boats had come with rations of food--we too must take to the water.

At eight o'clock in the morning I chartered my first boat, with captain
and crew, at sixty dollars per day, to be at once laden to the water's
edge with coal--our own supplies to be stored on the upper deck--and at
four o'clock in the afternoon, as the murky sun was hiding its clouded
face, the bell of the "John V. Troop," in charge of her owner, announced
the departure of the first Red Cross relief-boat ever seen on American
waters.

I found myself that night with a stanch crew of thirty men and a skilled
captain, and a boat under my command. I had never until then held such a
command. We wove the river diagonally from side to side--from village to
village--where the homeless, shivering people were gathered--called for
the most responsible person--a clergyman if one could be found, threw
off boxes of clothing, and hove off coal for a two weeks' supply, and
steamed away to the opposite side, leaving only gratitude, wonder at who
we were, where we came from, and what that strange flag meant? We
improved every opportunity to replenish our supply of coal, and reached
Cairo in five days.

Waiting only to reload, we returned up the river, resupplied the revived
villages of people, too grateful for words, reaching Evansville at the
end of th