During all this time she had been supporting her work of correspondence out of her own pocket. The time came when she invested in it the very last dollar of her quick assets. Her old friend Colonel De Witt, through whom she had obtained her first Government appointment, had invested her Oxford money. At her request he sent her the last of it, a check for $228. She wrote in her diary: “This is the last of my invested money, but it is not the first time in my life that I have gone to the bottom of my bag. I guess I shall die a pauper, but I haven’t been either stingy or lazy, and if I starve I shall not be alone; others have. Went to Mechanics’ Bank and got my check cashed.” She certainly had not been lazy, and she never was stingy with any one but herself. Keeping her own expenses at the minimum and living so frugally that she was sometimes thought parsimonious, she saw her last dollar of invested money disappear, and recorded a grim little joke about her poverty and the possibility of starvation. But she shed no tears. In the few times when she broke down and wept, the occasion was not her own privation or personal disappointment, but the failure of some plan through which she sought to be of service to others. This is a rather long retrospect, but it explains why Clara Barton, when she wanted to publish a book, contemplated the cost of it as an item beyond her personal means. She could have published the book at her own expense had it not been for the money she had spent for others. Congress did not permit her to lose the money which she had expended. In all her diary and correspondence no expression of fear has been found as to her own remuneration. She thought it altogether likely she could get her money back, but there is no hint that she would have mourned, much less regretted what she had done, if she had never seen her money again.