“I won’t give you a dollar.  I helped to buy the old hearse twenty years ago, and neither me nor my family have ever had any benefit from it.”

Against this trait of selfishness I place the most beautiful of all traits—­sympathy.  I would rather have the record of Clara Barton in the great reckoning day than that of any statesman whose portrait hangs in a hall of fame.

During our Civil War she went from battlefield to battlefield, and was just as kind to the boy in gray as she was to the boy in blue.

After the Civil War Queen Victoria desired to communicate with Clara Barton regarding the same mission of mercy for the German army, where the Queen’s daughter was then engaged.  But Clara Barton was already on the ocean, and soon after was in the war zone with the German army.  She was with the first who climbed the defenses of Strassburg, where she ministered to the wounded and dying.  At the close of her work there she took ten thousand garments with her to France.  There she waited till the Commune fell and again she was with the first to reach the suffering.  In our own war with Spain she went to Cuba, and though then past sixty years of age, she stood among the cots of our wounded and sick soldiers, soothing their sufferings and cheering their hearts.

Still later on in storm-swept Galveston, Texas, she fell at her post of duty and was borne back by loving hands to her home, where she recovered and again resumed her work of love and mercy, to carry it on to the end of her long and useful life.

No wonder the King and court of Germany bestowed upon her medals of remembrance; no wonder the Grand Duchess of Baden placed upon her the “Red Cross of Geneva;” and in the great day of reward, He who bore the cross for us all will place upon Clara Barton the crown of eternal life.

When my wife was president of the House of Mercy, in Lexington, Kentucky, a home for the rescue of fallen girls, she went in her carriage to a dentist with one of the unfortunate inmates.

Soon after a business man of the city said to me:  “I hardly see how you can give your consent to have your wife do such work.  I saw her recently in her carriage with a girl I would not have my wife seen with for any amount of money.”

My reply was:  “I would rather my wife should go through the golden gates, bearing in her arms the spirit of a poor girl, snatched from the hell of a harlot’s home, than to be the leader of the fashionable four hundred of New York City.”

There is a beautiful story told of one of the most influential and wealthy men of England.  He inherited fame as well as fortune, had an Oxford education and early in life he was elected a member of Parliament.  One evening he sat in his fine library, watching the wood fire build its temples of flame around the great andirons, and as he heard the beating of the wild winter storm against the window pane, his heart went out to the homeless hungry poor of the city.  Ordering