On her return to America, she went to her old home in Washington, on Pennsylvania Avenue and Capitol Hill, the home she had purchased before leaving, but occupied so short a time before her nervous breakdown. But she was not permitted to live there very long, because the corner was too noisy. Her physician, Dr. Thompson, commanded her to live elsewhere. The doctor assigned her her limits, “jail-limits” she called them; she might live somewhere between Seventh and Sixteenth Streets, and on the farther side of New York Avenue. She established herself at the corner of Fourteenth and F. Her letters to her nieces in this period are cheerful, but written under the burden of physical pain and nerve fatigue. On May 23 she received word that her sister Sarah, Mrs. Vester Vassall, was fatally ill. Though far from well, she hastened to Massachusetts, arriving in the evening to find that her sister had died that morning. The shock of her sister’s death, coming as it did when her own health was so precarious, brought back her old trouble with full force. For several months she remained in Oxford and Worcester, and then went to North Grafton--New England Village it was called--where her relatives, the Learned family, had a country home. There she took a house, and remained for a considerable time attended by Minnie Kupfer, who had served with her in the Franco-Prussian War, and, like Antoinette Margot, had followed her to this country. Her health varied with the season and with other conditions not all of them easy to determine. There were times when she had hard chills, followed by dripping sweats. There were weeks when she had no strength even to lift her head. There were bright days also, when she moved about with some approach to health. What was the real nature of Clara Barton’s illness during this long period of suffering? Material is not lacking for a fairly accurate diagnosis. Having exhausted the resources of local physicians, she entered into correspondence with a series of doctors, each of whom professed to be able to bring her permanent relief. Some of these called for very little information about her condition. Their remedies were supposed to cure almost anything. But others sent long lists of questions calling for full and minute replies. Copies of these questions and of her answers, she preserved. From her replies it would appear that there was hardly a bodily function which was not disturbed. She was subject to hard colds, to severe headaches, a weak back, digestive trouble, and to periodic attacks of camp diarrhœa from which so many soldiers suffered for so many years after the war, this condition alternating with stubborn constipation.