A cyclone occurring within a few months in Louisiana and southern Alabama, cutting a swath from New Orleans to Mobile, decided us to send eight hundred dollars of this reserve to the secretary of the Red Cross Society of New Orleans, which sum was forwarded by our vice-president, Mr. A. S. Solomons. This left a sum of two hundred dollars and some cents in the treasury with which to commence another field. This was the commencement of 1883. In May, at the solicitation of General Butler, then Governor of Massachusetts, I took the superintendence of the Massachusetts Woman's State Prison at Sherborn, at the customary salary of fifteen hundred dollars a year. To this duty the Legislature added, after my arrival, those of secretary and treasurer, without increase of salary, discharging the former incumbent, a man, at three thousand dollars a year. I accepted the new duties, became my own bondsman for ten thousand dollars, by transfer of that amount of bonds from my bankers, Brown Brothers, New York, to the Massachusetts State Treasury at Boston--remaining in charge of the prison until the close of the year, and the retirement of General Butler as Governor. In the short and interrupted existence of our association--scarce two years--our few official advisers had formed some general regulations, relating to our course of procedure. Realizing that to be of any real service as a body of relief for sudden disasters, we must not only be independent of the slow, ordinary methods of soliciting relief, but in its means of application as well, it was decided: _First._ To never solicit relief or ask for contributions. _Second._ Not to pay salaries to officers--paying out money only to those whom we must employ for manual labor--and as our officers served without compensation they should not be taxed for dues. _Third._ To keep ourselves always in possession of a stated sum of money to commence a field of disaster--this sum to be independent even of the closed doors of a bank which might prevent leaving for a field on a Sunday or holiday. _Fourth._ To take this sum of our own, going directly to a field with such help as needed, giving no notice until there, overlooking the field, and learning the extent of the trouble and conditions of the people, making immediate and reliable report to the country through the Associated Press, some of whose officers were our own Red Cross officers as well. These reports would be truthful, unexaggerated, and non-sensational statements that could be relied upon. _Fifth._ That if, under these conditions, the people chose to make use of us as distributers of the relief which they desired to contribute to the sufferers, we would do our best to serve them while at the field--make report directly to each and all contributors, so far as in our power, and proceed to carry out any directions and apply the relief at hand, in the wisest manner possible, among a dazed and afflicted community.