With this quotation from the familiar but effective poem of Mrs. Norton, Clara Barton opened her first public lecture, which she delivered at Poughkeepsie, on Thursday evening, October 25, 1866. The lecture was an hour and a quarter in length as she read it aloud in her room, but required about an hour and a half as she delivered it before a public audience. It was, as she recorded in her diary, “my first lecture,” and “the beginning of remunerative labor” after a long period in which she had been without salary. She knew that it was her first lecture, but the audience did not. She returned from it to the house of Mr. John Mathews, where she was entertained, ate an ice-cream, went to bed and slept well. She received her first fee of one hundred dollars. On Saturday night she spoke in Schenectady, where she received fifty dollars, and found, what many a lecturer has learned, that it was not profitable to cut prices. A diminished fee means less local advertising. The audience was smaller and less appreciative. On Monday evening she spoke in Brooklyn. Theodore Tilton presided and introduced her. There she had an ovation. Mr. Tilton accompanied her to her hotel after the lecture, and she told him that she was just beginning, and asked for his criticism. He told her the lecture contained no flaw for him to mend. She went back to Washington enthusiastic over the success of her new venture. She had spoken three times, and two of the lectures had been a pronounced success. Her expenses had been less than fifty dollars, and she was two hundred dollars to the good. She found awaiting her in Washington a large number of requests to lecture in different places, and she arranged a New England tour. She began with Worcester and Oxford. She did this with many misgivings, not forgetting the lack of honor for a prophet in his own country. She spoke in Mechanic’s Hall in Worcester, before a full house. She got her hundred dollars, but was not happy over the lecture. In Oxford, however, things went differently. She had a good house, and “the pleasantest lecture I shall ever deliver. Raced home all happy and at rest. My best visit at home.” Here she refused to receive any fee, placing the proceeds of the lecture in the hands of the overseers of the poor. She lectured at Salem, at Marlborough, and then at Newark, and again returned to Washington convinced that her plan was a success. Her next tour took her to Geneva and Lockport, New York, Cleveland and Toledo, Ohio, Ypsilanti and Detroit, Michigan, and on the return trip to Ashtabula, Ohio, Rochester and Dansville, New York. Her fee was a hundred dollars in every place excepting Dansville, but her lecture at this last place proved to be of importance. There she learned about the water cure, which later was to have an important influence upon her life. All these lectures on her third trip left a pleasant memory, except the one at Ashtabula, which for some reason did not go well.