"Three years afterward I read in the papers of the floods that had swept
through the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, and of the thousands that were
homeless. Bertie,--he was six then,--he listened to the account of the
children walking the streets, crying because they hadn't a roof over
them or anything to eat. He didn't say a word, but he climbed up to the
mantel and took down his little red savings-bank.

"We were pretty near on our feet again by that time, although we were
still living in a cabin. The crops had been good, and we had been able
to save a little. He poured out all the pennies and nickels in his
bank,--ninety-three cents they came to,--and then he got his only store
toy, a box of tin soldiers that had been sent to him Christmas, and put
that on the table beside the money. We didn't appear to notice what he
was doing. Presently he brought the mittens his grandmother up in
Vermont had knit for him. Then he waited a bit, and seemed to be
weighing something in his mind. By and by he slipped 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,"