When a little child upon his knee he told me that, as he lay helpless in the tangled marshes of Michigan the muddy water oozed up from the track of an officer’s horse and saved him from death by thirst. And that a mouthful of a lean dog that had followed the march saved him from starvation. When he told me how the feathered arrow quivered in the flesh and the tomahawk swung over the white man’s head, he told me also, with tears of honest pride, of the great and beautiful country that had sprung up from those wild scenes of suffering and danger. How he loved these new States for which he gave the strength of his youth! Two sons and two daughters were born to Stephen and Sarah Barton in their early married life. Then for ten years no other children were born to them. On Christmas, 1821, their eldest daughter, Dorothy, was as old as her mother had been at the time of their marriage. Their eldest son, Stephen, was fifteen, the younger son, David, was thirteen, and the daughter, Sally, was ten. The family had long considered itself complete, when the household received Clara as a Christmas present. Her brothers and sisters were too old to be her playmates. They were her protectors, but not her companions. She was a little child in the midst of a household of grown-up people, as they seemed to her. In her little book entitled “The Story of my Childhood,” she thus describes her brothers and sisters: I became the seventh member of a household consisting of the father and mother, two sisters and two brothers, each of whom for his and her intrinsic merits and special characteristics deserves an individual history, which it shall be my conscientious duty to portray as far as possible as these pages progress. For the present it is enough to say that each one manifested an increasing personal interest in the newcomer, and, as soon as developments permitted, set about instructing her in the various directions most in accord with the tastes and pursuits of each. Of the two sisters, the elder was already a teacher. The younger followed soon, and naturally my book education became their first care, and under these conditions it is little to say, that I have no knowledge of ever learning to read, or of a time that I did not do my own story reading. The other studies followed very early. My elder brother, Stephen, was a noted mathematician. He inducted me into the mystery of figures. Multiplication, division, subtraction, halves, quarters, and wholes, soon ceased to be a mystery, and no toy equaled my little slate. But the younger brother had entirely other tastes, and would have none of these things. My father was a lover of horses, and one of the first in the vicinity to introduce blooded stock. He had large lands, for New England. He raised his own colts; and Highlanders, Virginians, and Morgans pranced the fields in idle contempt of the solid old farm-horses.