One thing she deeply regretted, and that was that her retirement had not yet brought her sufficient leisure to sort her papers and prepare for the writing of her biography. That such a book would be written she fully realized, and she cared much who wrote it. She was perfectly well in body and clear in mind, and what she hoped to do was to go through a vast accumulation of manuscripts and make the task of writing an easier one. The author urged her to write the book herself, and she hoped to continue the work which she had begun and to write the story of her life in short sections. One such section she wrote and it is quoted in the first volume of this present work. But she found too much to do in helping the lives of others to pay very much attention to the record of her own life. So the years went by and her life-work was completed and her biography remained unwritten. She was always thinking of another thing that needed to be accomplished, and saying concerning it, “Until that work is done, I cannot go to heaven.” CHAPTER XX CLARA BARTON’S DEATH AND RESURRECTION Clara Barton died young. Even to those who were near her, she never seemed to grow old. At ninety there was no mark of physical infirmity upon her, nor was there any slightest slackening in the interest of the object for which so long she had cared. On her ninetieth birthday she wrote to the Reverend Percy H. Hepler: Notwithstanding the much and more that has been said of “age” and all the stress laid upon it, I could never see and have never been able to understand how it came to be any business of ours. We have surely no control over its beginning, and, unless criminally, none over its ending. We can neither hasten nor arrest it, and how it is a matter of individual commendation I have never been able to see. I have been able to see painfully that the persistent marking of dates and adding one milestone to every year has a tendency to increase the burden of “age” and encourages a feeling of helplessness and release from activities which might be a pleasure to the possessor. I have given the exact age as recorded, lest I be suspected of trying to conceal it, but I have never, since a child, kept a “birthday” or thought of it only as a reminder by others. Somehow it has come to me to consider strength and activity, aided so far as possible by right habits of life, as forming a more correct line of limitations than the mere passing of years.