“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 any of his 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.”

“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 were 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.”