“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 there.  A doctor’s wife who had been in the Mt.  Vernon cyclone, and a newspaper man who had visited the South Carolina islands after the tidal wave, and Charleston after the earthquake, piled up their accounts of those scenes of suffering, some of them even greater than the horrors of war, so that Lloyd could not sleep that night, for thinking of them.

“Betty,” she whispered, across the stateroom, turning over in her berth.  “Betty, are you awake?”

“Yes.  Do you want anything?”

“I can’t sleep.  That’s all.  Every time I shut my eyes I see all those awful things they told about:  cities in ruins, and dead people lying around in piles, and the yellow fevah camps, and floods and fiah.  It is a dreadful world, Betty.  No one knows what awful thing is goin’ to happen next.”