en were then eating the bread of charity; and for
the customless dressmaker, who was also a grievous sufferer by the
flood, with younger sisters to support. We gave her the first work she
had had for weeks, and her gratitude was good to see.

"As for merchants, who were all on the verge of failure, but making
heroic efforts to keep afloat--Heaven knows we did them injury enough
every day of our stay in Galveston, to be thankful for the privilege of
occasionally becoming their patrons. Not only had they suffered immense
losses by the storm, their stocks being practically ruined and customers
gone--but who would buy, so long as the Red Cross had food and clothes
to give away, without money and without price? Though ours is a noble
and necessary work, it is never to the advantage of the local merchants,
as a little reflection will show.

"Another case was that of a young woman, who, with an aged relative, was
keeping a hotel in a near-by village, when the floods lifted their house
from its foundations and ruined everything in it. Its four walls stood,
however, and furnished shelter for all the houseless neighbors, who
flocked in, naked and hungry, and with whom the generous girl divided
her last garment and bit of food. Death also entered the family, twice
within a few weeks--the last time leaving a sister's four half-grown
children for this young woman to maintain. Take them she must, because
they had nowhere else to go. Finding her in terrible straits, without
even clothes to wear to her sister's funeral, were we not justified in
buying the heroic young woman a decent suit of black, besides sending
her a box of food supplies? Why were we there, if not to exercise
judgment in the matter of relief? If merely to distribute second-hand
articles, without discrimination, we might have saved ourselves much
peril and hardship by remaining at home, and sending the boxes down to
take care of themselves.

"None of us will ever forget the grandniece of an ex-President of the
United States--a handsome and imposing woman of middle age, traveled,
educated, and evidently accustomed to the best society. She called one
day at headquarters, and although she did not ask for aid, the truth
came out in a heart-to-heart talk with Miss Barton that she had lost all
in the storm and had not where to lay her head, nor food for the morrow;
even the clothes she wore were not her own. Nobody living could put this
lady on the pauper list, and none w