LIKE TOLSTOI SHE LIVED THE SIMPLE LIFE
Clara Barton’s food was of the simplest. Costly food, even at another’s expense, she could not enjoy; eating costly food, to her, seemed a sin. For breakfast, her first choice of menu was a dish of graham mush, with milk and fruit; her second choice, meal grains and vegetables, with simple accompaniments.
COUNT LYOF NIKOLAYEVITCH TOLSTOI
I would like to visit the United States, but I would want to spend the time among the farmers. Give Clara Barton my love; I feel that we are related.—Count Lyof Nikolayevitch Tolstoi.
CO-WORKERS WITH CLARA BARTON
DR. HENRY W. BELLOWS
Miss Barton, I trust you will press this (Red Cross) matter upon our present administration with all the might of your well-earned influence.—Dr. Henry W. Bellows (November 21, 1881). Ex-Chairman, U. S. Sanitary Commission.
DR. JULIAN B. HUBBELL
Clara Barton was scrupulously honest, severely economical in her personal needs, always sacrificing self for others, and her simple life in her home was as beautiful as her public life.—Dr. Julian B. Hubbell, Clara Barton’s physician and co-worker in the field for thirty years.
A favorite meal was bread, cheese and a Rhode Island Greening Apple. Two meals a day satisfied, and nothing eaten between meals. No tea, no coffee, no substitutes, and no wine. A bottle of wine presented by a friend would last from one year to five years. There is now a bottle of Bordeaux, in her old home at Glen Echo, that has been there for twenty-five years. Like Tolstoi, she was a vegetarian, and an advocate of “low fare”; but, like Tolstoi, she did not so much as advise the household of which she was a member what to eat, or how much to eat. Like Tolstoi, Clara Barton lived the simple life, but did not impose her philosophy upon others; like Tolstoi, she lived to a ripe old age, endured persecution, and served the human race. So much in common were their habits of living, and their philosophy of human life, that Tolstoi, in sending his love to Clara Barton, said: “I feel that we are related.”