XVIII

With a strong, brilliant, cultivated mind was united a gentle, tender, loving heart, and nothing was too great, nothing too small to enlist Miss Barton’s earnest thought and tender sympathy.

Harriette L. Reed,Past National Secy. Woman’s Relief Corps.

Harriette L. Reed,

Past National Secy. Woman’s Relief Corps.

Men are what their mothers make them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

All I have, and am, I owe to my mother.A. Lincoln.

All that I am my mother made me.John Quincy Adams.

Work and words are for the individual soldier—what he does, sees, feels or thinks in the dread hours of leaden rain and iron hail.

Clara Barton.

I remember my mother’s prayers, and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life.A. Lincoln.

Happy heWith such a mother! faith in womankindBeats with his blood, and trust in all things highComes easy to him.Tennyson.

Happy he

With such a mother! faith in womankind

Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high

Comes easy to him.Tennyson.

As the years sped on and the hands were stilled, there shone the gleam of the far sighted mother’s watchfulness that neither toil could obscure nor time relax.Clara Barton.

His sweetest dreams were still of that dear voice that soothed his infancy.Southey.

TO DREAM OF HOME AND MOTHER

At Decatur, Alabama, in a well-remembered scene of the Civil War many were the songs by southern chivalry started, but none finished. All efforts to sing one evening having been boisterously tabooed, there arose in the air a voice carrying the sentiment that thrills the camp, the field, the hospital. In gloom for today with foreshadowing for tomorrow, around a score of camp fires thousands of voices following the leader there broke forth pathetic, in full chorus, “Who will care for Mother now?”

While General Butler was digging Dutch Gap in 1863, a hospital boat was plying daily between Fortress Monroe and Point of Rocks. In the Civil War, among the wounded brought in from the battlefield to Point of Rocks was a lad about sixteen or seventeen years of age. One of his arms, and a leg, had been amputated.

Away from home! Crippled for life! Homesick, and no “tear for pity.” Hope gone! No, not all hope. He still has his Mother—“She floats upon the river of his thoughts.”

A Mother is a Mother stillThe holiest thing alive.

A Mother is a Mother still

The holiest thing alive.

“Mother, come to me—thine own son slowly dying far away.” “No, youcan’tcome. May I come to you, my dearest Mother?”

Tired of the hollow, the base, the untrue,Mother, O Mother, my heart calls for you!

Tired of the hollow, the base, the untrue,

Mother, O Mother, my heart calls for you!

©Harris & EwingWARREN G. HARDINGThe President, also President American Red Cross Society, March 4, 1921–.From a letter by the Secretary to President Harding: “The President entertains the highest sentiment regarding the splendid service of Miss Barton and her contribution to the development of practical modern humanitarianism.”

His soldier chum heard his pleadings and interceded: “Miss Barton, can’t wepossiblyfind room for this boy on the boat going down to Fortress Monroe tonight? I think he has grit enough to live.” Miss Barton, turning to the boy said: “My dear boy, youshallgo, though they have sent word they can take no more.” The boy was taken down a long steep hill on a stretcher, tenderly placed in a nice comfortable cot way up on the hurricane deck, to dream of home and Mother.

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