He who rides on the electric cars from Worcester to Webster will pass Bartlett’s Upper Mills, where a weather-beaten sign at the crossroads points the way “TO CLARA BARTON’S BIRTHPLACE.” About a mile from the main street, on the summit of a rounded hill, the visitor will find the house where she was born. It stands with its side to the road, a hall dividing it through the middle. It is an unpretentious home, but comfortable, one story high at the eaves, but rising with the rafters to afford elevation for chambers upstairs. In the rear room, on the left side, on the ground floor, the children of the Barton family were born. Clara was the fifth and youngest child, ten years younger than her sister next older. The eldest child, Dorothy, was born October 2, 1804, and died April 19, 1846. The next two children were sons, Stephen, the third to bear the name, born March 29, 1806, and David, born August 15, 1808. Then came another daughter, Sarah, born March 20, 1811. These four children followed each other at intervals of a little more than two years; but Clara had between her and the other children the wide gap of more than a decade. Her brothers were fifteen and thirteen, respectively, and her sister was “going on eleven” when she arrived. She came into a world that was already well grown up and fully occupied with concerns of its own. Had there been between her and the other children an ascending series of four or five graduated steps of heads, the first a little taller than her own, and the others rising in orderly sequence, the rest of the universe would not have been quite so formidable; but she was the sole representative of babyhood in the home at the time of her arrival. So she began her somewhat solitary pilgrimage, from a cradle fringed about with interested and affectionate observers, all of whom had been babies a good while before, but had forgotten about it, into that vast and vague domain inhabited by the adult portion of the human race; and while she was not unattended, her journey had its elements of solitude. CHAPTER III HER ANCESTRY The Bartons of America are descended from a number of immigrant ancestors, who have come to this country from England, Scotland, and Ireland. The name, however, is neither Scotch nor Irish, but English. While the several families in Great Britain have not as yet traced their ancestry to a single source, there appears to have been such a source. The ancestral home of the Barton family is Lancashire. The family is of Norman stock, and came to England with William the Conqueror, deriving their English surname from Barton Manor in Lancashire. From 1086, when the name was recorded in the Doomsday Book, it is found in the records of Lancashire.