Clara Barton was now forty-seven years old. For eight years, beginning with the outbreak of the Civil War, she had lived in rooms on the third floor of a business block. The two flights of stairs and the unpretentiousness of the surroundings had not kept her friends away. Her daily list of callers was a long one, and her evenings brought her so many friends that she spoke humorously of her “levees.” But she had begun to long for a home of her own, which she now was well able to afford. Since the appropriation of Congress of fifteen thousand dollars and her earnings from her lectures, all of which she had carefully invested, she possessed not less than thirty thousand dollars in good interest-bearing securities. She had brought from Andersonville a colored woman, Rosa, who now presided over her domestic affairs. She spent a rather cheerless Christmas on her forty-seventh birthday in her old room on 7th Street, and determined not to delay longer. She bought a house. On the outside it looked old and shabby, but inside it was comfortable. On Tuesday, December 29, 1868, she packed her belongings. Next day she records: December 30, 1868, Wednesday. Moved. Mr. Budd came early with five men. Mr. Vassall, Sally, and myself all worked, and in the midst of a fearful snowstorm and a good deal of confusion, I broke away from my old rooking of eight years and launched out into the world all by myself. Took my first supper in my own whole house at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Capitol Hill. She had engaged her movers at a stipulated price of six dollars, but she was so happy with the result that she paid them ten dollars, which for a woman of Clara Barton’s careful habits indicated a very large degree of satisfaction. The next day, assisted by her colored woman Rosa and her negro man Uncle Jarret, and with some help from two kindly neighbors, she set things to rights. It was a stormy day and she was tired, but happy to be in her home. She wrote in her diary: “This is the last day of the year, and I sometimes think it may be my last year. I am not strong, but God is good and kind.” It is pathetic that the joy of her occupancy of her new home should have been clouded by any forebodings of this character. Her premonition that it might be her last year came very near to being true. Heavy had been the strain upon her from the day when the war began, and the events of the succeeding years had all drawn upon her vitality. What occurred at the height of her success in Bordentown came again to her at the height of her career upon the lecture platform. She rode one night to address a crowded house, and she stood before them speechless. Her voice utterly failed. Her physicians pronounced it nervous prostration, prescribed three years of complete rest, and ordered her to go to Europe. END OF VOLUME I Transcriber’s Notes In a couple of places, obvious errors in punctuation have been corrected and inconsistent hyphenization was standardized.