With the highest esteem
I am very truly yours
Clara Barton
I cannot describe how painful and tiresome I find it to work here, abroad, among these strangers, with every thought and sympathy and energy turning and rushing four thousand miles across the ocean to our own beautiful and ill-fated city,[1] with its hundred thousand homeless heads. At night I can realize this a little; in the morning I think I have dreamed a bad dream. The facts will not remain fixed with me.
A message has been sent from the Court of Baden to say that I am desired there. This is the third time I have been asked in the last two months, but was always too busy to go immediately, but now that I am so near and the message made so direct, I must go. If I can finish my work first I will; if not, I must leave it a little and return. I have no idea what is wanted of me. I will send this enclosed to Baring Bros.
Hastily
C. B.
This work continued for some time and there came no definite date which could be accounted its termination. For this reason and because of the condition of her health, the final report was not presented until after her return to America. Then in a letter to Mr. Dwight, the chairman, and Mr. Jackson, the secretary, Miss Barton sent her final accounting, asking for its approval, on receipt of which she proposed to return the balance in her hands. Her letter is as follows:
Messrs. Edmund Dwight and P. T. Jackson
Boston
Esteemed Friends:
It has long been a subject of deep regret to me that I have been unable to make my report of the expenditure of certain sums of money placed in my hands by you, as agents for the distribution of the “French Relief Fund” sent by the city of Boston to the people of France who had been rendered destitute by the war of 1870-71. My apology for this long delay is physical illness, which overtook me before the work of distribution was completed in 1872, and has, with the exception of a few months, held me prostrate from that time until the present, more than two thirds of the time unable to leave my bed, and one year unable to transact the smallest item of my own business, or even hear of it as done by others.
But all this time it has been a source of pain and unrest to me that I could not close the account and make the proper returns to you; and all the more so, as there is still a portion of the money which I did not expend, and which I desire to return to you; and only He who knows and comprehends all can know with what gratitude I welcome the past few weeks of returning strength, which have enabled me to go over the long undisturbed packages of letters, receipts, and vouchers which have traveled with and remained by me all these weak and weary years, and arrange them to be at last given up to you, who have waited upon my silence with a gentlemanly kindness seldom met in the rough business of life.