“We were powerless to help ourselves.  But while we sat there in utter despair, a neighbour rode by and hailed us.  He told us that Red Cross committees had started out from Milwaukee and Chicago at first tidings of the fire, 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 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.”