She listened with startled eyes as he described the wall of flame, hemming in the peaceful home where his little son played around the doorstep.  She held her breath while he told of their mad flight from it, when, lashing his horses into a gallop, he looked back to see it licking up everything in the world he held dear except the frightened little family huddled at his feet.  He had worked hard to build the cottage.  It was furnished with family heirlooms brought West with them from the old homestead in Vermont.  It was hard to see those great red tongues devouring it in a mouthful.

In the morning, although they had reached a place of safety, they were out in a charred, blackened wilderness, without a roof to shelter them, a chair to sit on, or a crust to eat.  “The hardest thing to bear,” he said, “was to hear my little three-year-old Bertie begging for his breakfast, and to know that there was nothing within miles of us to satisfy his hunger, and that the next day it would be the same, and the next, and the next.

“We were powerless to help ourselves.  But while we sat there in utter despair, a neighbor 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, business-like 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.