She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness. Proverbs.
In October, 1911 (at the age of 90), while she was propped up in bed and seriously ill, I asked “why, Miss Barton, you haven’t a gray hair in your head, have you?” Quick was the response, “I don’t know, I haven’t had time to look.” The Author.
Oftener than I could wish my heart sinks heavily, oppressed with fear that I am falling short of the fulfillment of life’s duties.
Clara Barton.
Domestic Happiness, thou only bliss
Of Providence that hast survived the Fall. Cowper Task.
SIMPLICITY OF CHILDHOOD—PET WASPS PET CATS—LOVED LIFE-DOMESTIC
The simplicity of childhood continued with Clara Barton through to her latest years. Because requested by children in letters to do so, at eighty-six years she commenced to write “The Story of My Childhood.” She did not reach second childhood; she was in her first childhood at ninety. On a certain occasion, having declined to address an audience, she reconsidered and said: “Oh, yes, I will talk to the children.”
Pets, as in childhood, continued; she had them wherever she happened to be,—pets of the chickens, pets of the birds, pets of the squirrels, pets of the domestic animals. She saw Divinity in nature; loved as does the believer in pantheism, as does the believer in the “transmigration of souls.” To the science of entomology she was not a stranger. Among her swarms of bees she continued the student of those who work for man and do not “bruise their Master’s flower;” loved even that household “pest,” the wasp.
A wasp met a bee that was just buzzing by