Clara Barton spent four years more tracing out the fate of thirty thousand missing men. To her great joy she learned that thousands upon thousands of those who had been reported as deserters had bravely given their lives for their country. Miss Barton then went to Europe to rest awhile and regain the health she had lost by overwork. While there she studied the work of a Swiss who was trying to found a new society for nursing and caring for the sick and wounded soldiers of all nations. Because it had a red cross on a white ground for badge and flag, it was named the Red Cross Society. When war broke out between France and Prussia, Clara Barton became known as “the Angel of the Battlefields” of France. After her return to the United States she began to organize the American Red Cross Society, which has since become the greatest power in the world for the relief of suffering. Wherever there was a calamity or a pestilence--the great forest fire in Michigan; the earthquake at Charleston, South Carolina; yellow fever in Florida; the Johnstown flood in Pennsylvania; the Turkish massacres in Armenia--there Clara Barton, though now an old woman, was always “the first to come and the last to go.” Though she was seventy-seven in the year of the war with Spain, she was active in sharing the hardships of the American soldiers in Cuba, nursing Roosevelt’s Rough Riders along with the rest of the sick and wounded at the front. Though she lived to be over ninety, honored and beloved by millions for her constant labors of love and mercy, Clara Barton did not live to see, in the World War, the most wonderful carrying out of all her plans for soldiers on the field and in the hospital. The beautiful woman known as “the World Mother,” pictured on the poster displayed to raise money and supplies for the Red Cross work in America, might well have been the portrait of Clara Barton, for no woman in all history has done more to relieve and heal the sufferings of mankind. The millions upon millions of men, women, and children now numbered in the membership of the American Red Cross Society, by giving, knitting, rolling bandages, or buying Red Cross stamps and Christmas seals, are carrying on the work begun by the frail, sickly, bashful little girl whose yearning heart and busy hands gave her the name of the “Angel of the Battlefield.” HENRY W. LONGFELLOW, THE AMERICAN CHILDREN’S POET Living in Portland, Maine, a town of rare beauty, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow could hardly have helped being a poet, even if he had tried. He was born in a big, square, three-story house, close to the edge of Casco Bay, one of the largest and loveliest harbors in the world. Portland stands on several wooded hills, overlooking the bay, which is said to contain three hundred and sixty-five small islands--one for every day in the year. On the blue water the green islands sparkle like emeralds on a shining sea of sapphire.