I live to learn their story, Who suffered for my sake; To emulate their glory And follow in their wake; Bards, patriots, martyrs, sages, The noble of all ages, Whose deeds crown History’s pages, And Time’s great volume make. · · · · · For the cause that needs assistance, For the wrongs that need resistance, For the future in the distance And the good that I can do. THE FOREWORD The author undertakes to produce a few pen pictures of a personal friend—humanity’s friend. They are pictures of sentiment, pictures of reality—pictures of humanity. Although precluded the use of data left by Clara Barton for her biography the author, nevertheless, is conforming to the sentiment of her oft expressed wish that he write the story of her life. Recognizing the wish to be a sacredly imposed trust, for the past six years he has gleaned what he could for his sketches from public documents, from her personal friends in California, New England, New York, Washington and elsewhere, as well as from his memory of facts developing through the years he enjoyed her confidence and received from her highest inspirations. The author assumes not a rôle literary—has herein no aspirations, literary. His impulse to write is not fame; it is sentiment, a love-sentiment for a woman whom all the world loves and whose “life gives expression to the sympathy and tenderness of all the hearts of all the women of the world.” His motive in writing is to point a moral in “a passion for service”; to limn scenes, vivid, along “paths of charity over roadways of ashes”; to depict for the lesson it teaches a career, a career the memory of which must remain a rich heritage to the American people. In life’s drama, wherein Clara Barton played the leading rôle, there appear faces to inspire, faces to instruct, but also the faces of intrigue. In the closing incidents of a life-heroic time’s detectives disclose the plotters, and the motive in their plot to destroy— Like a led victim to my death I’ll go, And, dying, bless the hand that gave the blow. Except now and then in dim outline, the faces of intrigue in the _tragic_ scene do not appear. These faces are un-American—inhuman—and would mar humanity’s picture. The Divine Humanitarian forgave His enemies, but the picture of the crucified on the cross ever suggests the Pontius Pilate and the executioners. Clara Barton also forgave her enemies, and yet some day a literary artist may portray the Judasette Iscariot, or possibly the plotting Antony and Cleopatra, to make a Clara Barton picture historically and tragically complete.