Her lack of love of music reached its climax in her abhorrence of piano-drumming. For piano music she had some little love, but not enough to compensate for the annoyance for having a piano where it could be pounded by any visitor, skilled or unskilled. For many years she refused to have a piano in her house. At last she permitted one to be procured, and she gave it house-room, and sometimes heard it played with satisfaction. But when she was hard at work and wanted to concentrate her thought, she found no joy in the thoughtless hammering which an open piano seemed to invite. There was a time for all things, even for piano-playing, and in its proper time and place she could permit it and enjoy a part of it; but she did not want the menace of it from early morn till dewy eve and several hours thereafter. Her home was a very open place of entertainment, and she could not well inquire, before admitting a person who needed shelter, what were his or her habits and ability with respect to the torture of piano keys. So she would have preferred a home with only such music as was brought in where,and when it was wanted. But she accepted the piano as in some sort inevitable, and it did not annoy her as much as she had expected. If Clara Barton did not care for music, she did dearly love poetry. From her earliest childhood she was reading it, committing it to memory, copying it, and writing original lines of her own. There lies before me, as I write, her first copy-book. The strokes and curves she learned to imitate are there, then the letters, lower case and capitals, then the first words, “thoughtful,” “Nation,” and “National,” and the sentence, chosen perhaps for its varied arrangement of letters with the simplest stem and curve, and partly because it was not well for a New England child at school to begin life with any illusion about its essential character, “Man was made to mourn.” Who was the teacher who set her these copies we do not know, but she copied them well. The first poetic lines that she was given to transcribe were these, melodious but not precisely soothing to the juvenile mind: Then rose the cry of females, shrill, As goss-hawks whistle on the hill, Denouncing misery and ill, Mingled with childhood’s bubbling thrill Of curses stammered slow; Answering, with imprecation dread, “Sunk be his home in embers red, And cursed be the meanest shed That e’er shall hide his houseless head We doom to want and woe!” This was rather strong sentiment for a timid and sympathetic little girl, and she would probably have shuddered at it in prose; but in verse she probably committed it to memory as she was in process of copying it.