away to the chest
where his Sunday clothes were kept and took them out, new suit, shoes,
cap and all, and laid them on the table with the money and the tin
soldiers.

"'There, daddy,' he said, 'tell the Red Cross people to send them to
some little boy like me, that's been washed out of his home and hasn't
any of his toys left, or his clothes.'

"I tell you it made a lump come up in my throat to see that the little
fellow had taken his very best to pay his debt of gratitude. Nothing was
too great for him to sacrifice. Even his tin soldiers went when he
remembered what the Red Cross had done for him."

"My experience with the Red Cross was in the Mississippi floods of '82,"
said a gentleman who had joined the party. "One winter day we were
attracted by screams out in the river, and found that they came from
some people who were floating down on a house that had been washed away.
There they were, that freezing weather, out in the middle of the river,
their clothes frozen on them, ill from fright and exposure. I went out
in one of the boats that were sent to their rescue, and helped bring
them to shore. I was so impressed by the tales of suffering they told
that I went up the river to investigate.

"At every town, and nearly every steamboat landing, I found men from the
relief committees already at work, distributing supplies. They didn't
stop when they had provided food and clothing. They furnished seed by
the car-load to the farmers, just as in the Galveston disaster, a few
years ago, they furnished thousands of strawberry plants to the people
who were wholly dependent on their crops for their next year's food."

"Where did they get all those stores?" asked Lloyd. "And the seeds and
the strawberry plants?"

"Most of it was donated," answered the gentleman. "Many contributions
come pouring in after such a disaster, just as little Bertie's did. But
the society is busy all the time, collecting and storing away the things
that may be needed at a moment's notice. People would contribute, of
course, even if there were no society to take charge of their donations,
but without its wise hands to distribute, much would be lost."

It was from a sad-faced lady in black, who had had two sons drowned in
the Johnstown flood, that Lloyd heard the description of Clara Barton's
five months' labor there. A doctor's wife who had been in the Mt. Vernon
cyclone, and a newspaper man who had visited the South Carolina islands
after the t