began, and then her only daughter, the Grand Duchess Louise of Baden,
turned all her beautiful castles into military hospitals, and went
herself to superintend the work of relief.

"Your country did not join with us at first. You were having your
terrible Civil War at home; the one in which your grandfather fought.
All this time Clara Barton was with the soldiers on their bloodiest
battle-fields. When you go home, ask your grandfather about the battles
of Bull Run and Antietam, Fredericksburg, and the Wilderness. She was
there. She stood the strain of nursing in sixteen such awful places,
going from cot to cot among the thousands of wounded, comforting the
dying, and dragging many a man back from the very grave by her untiring,
unselfish devotion.

"When the war was over, she spent four years searching for the soldiers
reported missing. Hundreds and hundreds of pitiful letters came to her,
giving name, regiment, and company of some son or husband or brother,
who had marched away to the wars and never returned. These names could
not be found among the lists of the killed. They were simply reported as
'missing'; whether dead or a deserter, no one could tell. She had spent
weeks at Andersonville the summer after the war, identifying and marking
the graves there. She marked over twelve thousand. So when these
letters came imploring her aid, she began the search, visiting the old
prisons, and trenches and hospitals, until she removed from twenty
thousand names the possible suspicion that the men who bore them had
been deserters.

"No wonder that she came to Europe completely broken down in health, so
exhausted by her long, severe labors that her physician told her she
must rest several years. But hardly was she settled here in Switzerland