The Life of Clara Barton, Founder of the American Red Cross (Vol. 2 of 2)Barton, William E. (William Eleazar)
History
The Life of Clara Barton, Founder of the American Red Cross (Vol. 2 of 2)
Barton, William E. (William Eleazar)
American National Red Cross -- Biography; Barton, Clara, 1821-1912; Nurses -- United States -- Biography
Did I tell you that the Taylors had sailed for England? They must be
there now. How sweet and beautiful they were when here, and how in the
two or three little days they spent here they made themselves felt
and beloved. Mrs. Taylor is really one of the sweetest women I have
ever known. Fannie is at the Centennial and I have just one line from
her. She is almost frantic from the confusion. You know her head gets
troubled easily, and she had not got it rested from the journey and
the first days of the great show. She will remain long enough to find
herself and look clearly and see what she “went for to see,” I trust.
I am glad you have heard from Etta and glad they are getting on so
well. Please give a great deal of love to dear Anna and congratulate
her on her Centennial trip which, I trust, she enjoyed to its fullest,
and thank Mr. Shrubler for his good gift to my dear old brother. I
know it has made a warm spot in his heart for all the time he will
live to wear it, and with his poor health and tendency to melancholy
his joys are not too many. Mr. Shrubler has given him a great many
pleasures, and I thank him most earnestly for them all.
My kitty is charming. She knows almost as much as folks, and has just
taken to mousing. She often carries in two and three and sometimes
four and five bits of game a day, and all the family have to recognize
each one before she will be at all quiet. She is too comical, standing
at the door with her nice white face and her mouth full of mouse and
grass, calling all the household out to see her.
Yours lovingly
CLARA
Miss Barton’s views on health, on politics, on society, on idle women,
and incidentally, perhaps, her best description of herself, her tastes
and habits, is contained in a letter of this period to a learned German
professor, who, knowing of her life in Germany, wrote to her, and
proposed to visit her. It is interesting to note that in this letter
she speaks of her hair as having been dark brown and changed in a few
months of illness to a silvery gray. It did not remain gray, but with
her return of health resumed its color of brown, though not so dark as
before:
DANSVILLE, LIVINGSTON CO., N.Y.
April 17, 1877
ESTEEMED AND DEAR FRIEND:
I beg you not to be alarmed even if you were correct in your
conjecture that illness caused my silence. It is very true, but I am
so far recovered now that, although not released from my bed, I have
taken up my pen again, and yesterday, before receiving your card,
had laid out your last letter as one of the first to be answered. I
might, or I might not, have reached it to-day in regular order, but
now, I place it first, and commence my morning roll-call with “Prof.
Thed. Pfau,” and a long, narrow, blue-tinted envelope responds, half
wearily, half impatiently, “_Here_.” So “here” we have it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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