Still in the storm and mud, defeated and discouraged, sore and weak, I left Brussels and made Metz, which had that day opened its hungry gates. After a few hard days’ work among its famishing, fevered population I came once more to my work in Strassburg. I now saw clearly that I could effect nothing in the way of an organization to aid the work of our countrymen when they should see fit to commence it. I was grieved for the loss, through this account, to the suffering French and the loss of satisfaction to our countrymen eventually when the wiser ones should come to realize that they had _not_ done their _own work_ in _their own_ name and manner, and with the best results. But I was only one woman alone, and had no power to move to action full-fed, sleek-coated, ease-loving, pleasure-seeking, well-paid, and well-placed countrymen in this war-trampled, dead, old land, each one afraid that he should be called upon to do something. On June 1 Miss Barton left her well-organized work in Strassburg and hastened to Paris, where she spent about six weeks in the relief of suffering and distress. From there she went to Lyons, where she established another workroom such as she had had in Strassburg. Something of the detail of her work in Paris is afforded us in a brief letter to a gentleman in London, acknowledging a gift of five hundred pounds sterling for her work. We see something of the grim situation which she confronted in that city. A much more cheerful letter is one which she wrote to Annie Childs just as she was about to leave Lyons at the end of August. Annie had been her dressmaker for many years. This letter, informing Annie that she was now the head of a dressmaking establishment of her own, shows how fully at this time she seemed to have recovered her old vivacity, and to be, amidst the desolation of a conquered country, her own wholesome, self-reliant self: LYONS, FRANCE, August 20, 1871 MY DEAR ANNIE: If I were to make an apology as long as my offense, I could write nothing else, but I don’t like apologies; you don’t either, do you? Then let me hasten to proclaim myself an idle, lazy, procrastinating, miserable do-nothing and good-for-nothing; if that isn’t enough, I leave the sentence open for you to finish and I sign it squarely when you have done and call it “quits.” But really it _has_ been too bad. I have neglected everybody in general, not you in particular. I thought I was too busy to write. I don’t suppose I was, only that I did not employ my time well. _I know_ this is often so and perhaps always. I wish I had been better educated in this regard as well as every other. If you are ever married, as you doubtless will be, and have a family of eight or ten children, I beg you will make it a specialty in their several educations that they be taught to do things in the proper time. You will do me a favor to remember this as one of “my efforts for the good of humanity.”