“Sometimes, in later years, when I found myself suddenly on a strange horse in a trooper’s saddle, flying for life or liberty, I blessed my baby lessons and wild gallops among the beautiful colts.” By the words, “riding for life on a strange horse in a trooper’s saddle,” Miss Barton referred to her life as an army nurse, when she, with the mounted soldiers, sometimes found herself in great danger when the enemy’s cavalry was close behind. At the age of eleven, Clara had her first chance to learn to be a nurse and fit herself for her life work. Her brother [Illustration: CLARA BARTON, “THE ANGEL OF THE BATTLEFIELD.”] David, then a young man, fell from the ridgepole of a large barn he was helping to build. The shock of this fall affected his mind, besides making him ill in body. He wanted no one near him but the brave little sister he had taught “to ride like the wind.” So Clara stayed with her big brother, day and night, for two long years. She was thirteen when he was well again. Miss Barton told, long afterward, of the strange feeling she had at that time: “I was again free, my work done, I wondered that my father took me to ride so much, and that my mother hoped she could make me some new clothes now--for in those two years I had not grown an inch! “My shut-in life had made me the more bashful. I had grown even more timid, shrinking, and sensitive in the presence of others; also I was afraid of giving trouble by making my wants known. Instead of feeling that my freedom gave me time for play, it seemed to me like time wasted, and I looked about, anxious to find something useful to do.” Then the family sent Clara away to school, hoping to conquer her painful shyness. She studied so hard that, at the age of fifteen, she became a teacher. There were not many public schools in those days, twenty-five years before the Civil War; and the few free schools were looked down on by well-to-do people as “charity” schools. Clara Barton began with one of these schools where she had at first only six poor children to teach. But she was such a good teacher that before long six hundred came there to be pupils under her charge. She tried very hard to help everyone she could; at the end of eighteen years’ service as a teacher she had become almost an invalid and had lost her voice.