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[117] contributions at times when they were most wanted. She herself declares, with — generous exaggeration, that if she has ever done any good, it has been due to the watchful care and kindness of General Rucker. About the close of 1861, Miss Barton returned to Massachusetts to watch over the declining health of her father, now in his eighty-eighth year, and failing fast. In the following March she placed his remains in the little cemetery at Oxford, and then returned to Washington and to her former labors. But, as the spring and summer campaigns progressed, Washington ceased to be the best field for the philanthropist. In the hospitals of the Capitol the sick and wounded found shelter, food and attendance. Private generosity now centered there; and the United States Sanitary Commission had its office and officers there to minister to the thousand exceptional wants not provided for by the Army Regulations. There were other fields where the harvest was plenteous and the laborers few. Yet could she as a young and not unattractive lady, go with safety and propriety among a hundred thousand armed men, and tell them that no one had sent her? She would encounter rough soldiers, and camp-followers of every nation, and officers of all grades of character; and could she bear herself so wisely and loftily in all trials as to awe the impertinent, and command the respect of the supercilious, so that she might be free to come and go at her will, and do what should seem good to her? Or, if she failed to maintain a character proof against even innuendoes, would she not break the bridge over which any successor would have to pass? These questions she pondered, and prayed and wept over for months, and has spoken of the mental conflict as the most trying one of her life. She had foreseen and told all these fears to her father; and the old man, on his death-bed, advised her to go wherever she felt it a duty to go. He reminded her that he himself had been a soldier, and said that all true soldiers would respect her. He was naturally a man of great benevolence, a member of the
1867.
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