Before it was light she woke and reached for her matches and her pencil, and sitting up in bed she wrote her address as fully as she cared to have it written. She rarely erased a word. Her mind was clear and her speech came to her just in the form in which she wished it. Her years of training as a school-teacher had laid well the foundations of her composition and rhetoric. She wrote, not rapidly, but accurately, and each word said exactly what she wanted to say.
Her address is finished before daylight, and she puts out the light and takes her final nap, but is up at her accustomed time, having enjoyed a good night’s rest, and is out in the garden and looking after the poultry until she joins her guests at breakfast.
After breakfast she copies her address in ink. Her handwriting is like copper-plate. When it is copied, she lays it aside. The process of copying it has photographed it upon her mind. She can deliver it either with or without manuscript. Although she trembles at the sight of an audience, she has learned to face one with perfect composure and no word of her speech escapes her memory.
Perhaps she excuses herself from lunch to-day and works at her desk, but not at the speech she is to deliver. It is her habit to keep free from any needless accumulation of unfulfilled duties. She sees her guests at the table and is herself within call, but for herself she has ordered an apple, a slice of bread, and a piece of cheese. No member of her household will suggest to her that she ought to eat more, and if one of her guests feels some compunction at eating a more ample repast while her hostess dines on homely fare, it is better that she keep her compunction to herself. If the guest should rise from the table and walk into the other room, carrying some delicacy, she would meet a mild rebuke. “I asked for exactly what I wanted,” Clara would say.
Outside the window at which she sits the mason wasps build their nests of mud. Woe unto the man who molests them! The sparrow finds a house and the swallow a nest in the shelter of the Lord of hosts, and the wasps are as welcome as the birds to a home at Glen Echo. Two or three wasps fly through the open window and light upon her half-eaten apple. She will not permit them to be driven away. There is enough for the wasps and for herself. Like Saint Francis and the birds, she is at home with every kind of gentle life, and the wasps, she maintains, are gentle if gently treated. She gently pushes them away from her apple when she is ready for another bite, cutting off a piece with her desk-knife and leaving it on the corner of her desk for the wasps. They also have a further portion in the core. They light upon her hand, her forehead, they buzz round her, but they never sting her. She and they are friends.
This is the kind of life Clara Barton lived in Glen Echo; and this is what those were privileged to see who visited her in her home.
CHAPTER XVII
CLARA BARTON’S RELIGION
Clara Barton was a religious woman. Her diaries, her home letters, her intimate confidences, all breathe a deeply religious spirit. But she was reserved concerning her personal religious feelings and convictions. Once, when she was abruptly asked by a stranger in a group of strangers what were her religious opinions, she answered that she could not undertake to answer so large a question in so short a time. She recorded this in her diary, with some resentment that she should have been called upon thus to stand and deliver at sight.
But sitting beside a dying soldier, she had no hesitation in praying with him, nor of telling him unreservedly her own faith in God and immortality.
She was reared a Universalist. In that faith she lived the greater part of her life. She did not, however, join the Universalist Church in her home town, and she went away quite early and never established personal relations with a church.