The young girl was as enthusiastic in play as at work. Whether it was a canter over the fields on Billy while her dog, Button, dashed along at her side, his curly white tail bobbing ecstatically, or a coast down the rolling hills in winter, she entered into the sport of the moment with her whole heart.
When there was no outlet for her superabundant energy, she was genuinely unhappy. Then it was that a self-consciousness and morbid sensitiveness became so evident that it was a source of real concern to her friends.
"People say that I must have been born brave," said Clara Barton. "Why, I seem to remember nothing but terrors in my early days. I was a shrinking little bundle of fears—fears of thunder, fears of strange faces, fears of my strange self." It was only when thought and feeling were merged in the zest of some interesting activity that she lost her painful shyness and found herself.
When she was eleven years old she had her first experience as a nurse. A fall which gave David a serious blow on the head, together with the bungling ministrations of doctors, who, when in doubt, had recourse only to the heroic treatment of bleeding and leeches, brought the vigorous young brother to a protracted invalidism. For two years Clara was his constant and devoted attendant. She schooled herself to remain calm, cheerful, and resourceful in the presence of suffering and exacting demands. When others gave way to fatigue or "nerves," her wonderful instinct for action kept her, child though she was, at her post. Her sympathy expressed itself in untiring service.
In the years that followed her brother's recovery Clara became a real problem to herself and her friends. The old blighting sensitiveness made her school-days restless and unhappy in spite of her alert mind and many interests.
At length her mother, at her wit's end because of this baffling, morbid strain in her remarkable daughter, was advised by a man of sane judgment and considerable understanding of child nature, to throw responsibility upon her and give her a school to teach.
It happened, therefore, that when Clara Barton was fifteen she "put down her skirts, put up her hair," and entered upon her successful career as a teacher. She liked the children and believed in them, entering enthusiastically into their concerns, and opening the way to new interests. When asked how she managed the discipline of the troublesome ones, she said, "The children give no trouble; I never have to discipline at all," quite unconscious of the fact that her vital influence gave her a control that made assertion of authority unnecessary.
"When the boys found that I was as strong as they were and could teach them something on the playground, they thought that perhaps we might discover together a few other worth-while things in school hours," she said.
For eighteen years Clara Barton was a teacher. Always learning herself while teaching others, she decided in 1852 to enter Clinton Liberal Institute in New York as a pupil for graduation, for there was then no college whose doors were open to women. When she had all that the Institute could give her, she looked about for new fields for effort.
In Bordentown, New Jersey, she found there was a peculiar need for some one who would bring to her task pioneer zeal as well as the passion for teaching. At that time there were no public schools in the town or, indeed, in the State.