Many interesting parallels suggest themselves between the work of Clara Barton and that of Florence Nightingale. They were contemporary in a remarkable degree. Florence Nightingale was a few months the older and died a few months sooner than Clara Barton, but both lived to be more than ninety years of age. Miss Nightingale was born May 12, 1820, and died August 13, 1910; Clara Barton was born December 25, 1821, and died April 12, 1912. They faced the question of marriage in much the same fashion, and each one gave herself in much the same spirit to her life-task. They were not unlike in their religious faith and in its practical expression. The long, confidential letters of Florence Nightingale, written painfully when she ought to have been in bed, remind us of the detailed epistles which Clara Barton found time to write, mostly late at night. Each had a love of humor which stood her in good stead; Miss Barton’s had less sting in it than that of Miss Nightingale, but otherwise it was not unlike, and it was a great help to both of them. Each had a gentle voice, and each knew how to use it effectively without raising it. Each protested to the end of her life that her real work was not that of the popular imagination, that of personally ministering to any considerable number of sick or wounded soldiers, but a work of direction and organization; and neither succeeded in making the public believe it. Not long before her death, Clara Barton relieved her mind in her diary concerning the sort of newspaper article which invented fairy-tales of this sort: “Oh, these women reporters!” she said in her diary. “They never get anything right. They are forever telling and inventing the same old kind of gush!” Florence Nightingale also had a profound distrust of the limitations of members of her own sex; but also she knew, as did Clara Barton, the brutality, the stupidity, and the inefficiency of men. Miss Nightingale often wondered if there were in all the army enough officers of sympathy and conscience to have saved Sodom. Sometimes she doubted if there was one.