O name in American literature has more thrilled the hearts of the young people of this generation than that of Louisa May Alcott. What a life of benefi

cence and self-abnegation was hers! How distinctively was her character an outcome of the best New England ancestry. In her veins ran the blood of the Quincys, the Mays, the Alcotts, and the Sewalls. What better inheritance could one have? and after all how important a factor in life is heredity! One is so enriched, strengthened, and upborne by a good ancestry, or sometimes, alas! so handicapped, baffled, and utterly defeated in the conflicts of life by bad hereditary influence, that when one has so fine an inheritance as was Louisa Alcott's, one should be thankful for it and rejoice in it as she did.

In looking back upon Miss Alcott's life, heroic and faithful to the end, it is the woman who interests us even more than the writer, whose phenomenal success in touching the hearts of old and young is known so well the world over. "Do the duty that lies nearest," was her life motto, and to its fulfilment were given hand and brain and heart. Helen Hunt Jackson once wrote of her: "Miss Alcott is really a benefactor of households." Truer words were never written. She was proud of her ancestors.

I remember a characteristic expression of hers as we sat together one morning in June, 1876, in the old South Meeting House, where was assembled an immense audience, stirred to a white heat of patriotic enthusiasm by the fervid eloquence of Wendell Phillips, whose plea to save that sacred landmark from the vandals who were ready to destroy it can never be forgotten. At the conclusion of Phillips's speech she turned to me, her face aglow with emotion, and said: "I am proud of my foremothers and forefathers, and especially of my Sewall blood, even if the good old judge did condemn the witches to be hanged." After a moment of silence she added: "I am glad that he felt remorse, and had the manliness to confess it. He was made of the right stuff." Of this ancestor, Whittier wrote in "The Prophecy of Samuel Sewall: "

"Stately and slow with solemn air,

His black cap hiding his whitened hair,
Walks the Judge of the great Assize,
Samuel Sewall, the good and wise;
His face with lines of firmness wrought
He wears the look of a man unbought."

Of the name of Quincy, Oliver Wendell
Holmes has written in "Dorothy Q:"
"Look not on her with eyes of scorn,
Dorothy Q was a lady born!

Ay! since the galloping Normans came,
England's annals have known her name;
And still to the three-hilled rebel town
Dear is that ancient name's renown,
For many a civic wreath they won,
The youthful sire and the gray-haired son."

him by some of the great thinkers of the age. In a note to me in October, 1882, just after her father had been stricken with paralysis, she wrote:

"My poor, dear father lies dumb and helpless. He seems to know us all-and it is so pathetic to see my handsome, hale, active old father changed at one fell blow into this helpless wreck. You know that he wrote those forty remarkable sonnets last winter, and these, with his cares as Dean of the School of Philosophy and his many lectures there, were enough to break down a man of eighty-three years. I continually protested

Amos Bronson Alcott

Miss Alcott began to write at a very early age. Her childhood and early girlhood were passed in the pure sweet atmosphere of a home where love reigned. Louisa and her sister Anna were educated in a desultory and fragmentary manner, or, perhaps one should say, without system. Mr. and Mrs. Alcott, the two Misses Peabody, Thoreau, Miss Mary Russell, and Mr. Lane had a share in their education. Mrs. Hawthorne taught Anna to read, and I think Louisa once spoke of her to me as her own first teacher.

Mrs. Alcott was a remarkable woman, a great reader, with a broad, practical mind, deep love of humanity, wide charity, untiring energy, and a highly sensitive organization, and she was married to a man whom she devotedly loved, who was absolutely devoid of practical knowledge of life, and who was an idealist of the extremest type. With the narrowest means, her trials, perplexities, and privations were very great, but she bore them all with heroic courage and fidelity, and with unwavering affection for her husband. Louisa early recognized all this. She soon developed the distinguishing traits of both father and mother. Emerson, soon after he made Mr. Alcott's acquaintance, recognized his consummate ability as a conversationalist, and was through life his most loyal friend. Louisa was very proud of her father's intellectual acquirements, and it was most interesting to hear her tell of the high tributes paid

Mrs. Alcott.

and warned him against overwork and taxation of the brain, but 'twas of no avail. Wasn't I

doing the same thing myself? I did not practise what I preached, and indeed I have great cause for fear that I may be some day stricken down as he is. He seems so tired of living; his active mind beats against the prison bars. Did I ever tell you what Mr. Emerson once said of him to me? Louisa, your father could have talked with Plato.' Was not that praise worth having? Since then I have often in writing addressed him as My dear old Plato.""

Just after the publication of the Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson, I found her reading it one day. Her face was radiant with delight as she said: "Let me read you what Emerson wrote to Carlyle just before father went to England. I shall write again soon, for Bronson Alcott will probably go to England in about a month, and him I shall surely send you, hoping to atone by his great nature for many smaller ones that have craved to see you.'" Again she read: "He is a great man and is made for what is greatest." "Alcott has

returned to Concord with his wife and children and taken a cottage and an acre of ground, to get his living by the help of God and his own spade. I see that some of the education people in England have a school called Alcott House,' after my friend. At home here he is despised and rejected of men as much as ever was Pestalozzi. But the creature thinks and talks and I am proud of my neighbor.' Carlyle's estimate of Alcott, although not as high as Emerson's, was a fairly appreciative one. He wrote to Emerson after Alcott's visits to him :

"He is a genial, innocent, simplehearted man, of much natural intelligence and goodness, with an air of rusticity, veracity, and dignity withal, which in many ways appeals to me. The good Alcott, with his long, lean face and figure, his gray worn temples and mild radiant eyes, all bent on saving the world by a return to the Golden Age; he comes before one like a kind Don Quixote, whom nobody can even laugh at without loving." Louisa, after reading these extracts, taken from different parts of the books, said with

when Mr. Fields said to her father, who had taken a story of hers to him to read with the hope that it might be accepted for the Atlantic: "Tell Louisa to stick to her teaching; she can never succeed as a writer!" This message, she said, made her exclaim to her father: "Tell him I will succeed as a writer, and some day I shall write for the Atlantic!" long afterward a story of hers was accepted by the Atlantic and a check for fifty dollars sent her. In telling me of

emphasis: "It takes great men like Emerson and Carlyle and Thoreau to appreciate father at his best." She always spoke with great freedom and frankness of her father's lack of practical ability; and very pathetic were some of the stories she told of her own early struggles to earn money for the family needs; of her strivings to smother pride while staying with a maternal relative who had offered her a home for the winter while she was teaching in a small private school in Boston; and of her indignation

Not

this she said: "I called it my happy money, for with it I bought a second-hand carpet for our parlor, a bonnet for Anna, some blue ribbons for May, some shoes and stockings for myself, and put what was left into the Micawber Railroad, the Harold Skimpole Three Per Cents, and the Alcott Sinking Fund."

One merry talk about the experiences of her girlhood and early womanhood, with several pathetic and tragic stories, one beautiful moonlight summer evening, as we floated down

the Concord River, made a profound impression on me, and I recall the stories with great distinctness.

"When I was a girl of eighteen or thereabouts," she said, "I had very fine dark brown hair, thick and long, almost touching the floor as I stood. At a time when the family needs were great, and discouragement weighed heavily upon us, I went to a barber, let down my hair, and asked him how much money he would give me for it. When he told me the sum, it seemed so large to me that I then

The Wayside

where, without an entire sacrifice of pride, they could earn an honest independence. One day as Louisa was sitting in the office sewing on some flannel garments for the poor, under her mother's supervision, a tall man, evidently from his garb a clergyman, entered

and said that he came

to procure a companion for his invalid sister and aged father. He described the situation as a most desirable one, adding that the companion would be asked to read to them and perform the light duties of the household that had formerly devolved upon his sister, who was a martyr to neuralgia. The companion would be in every respect treated as one of the family, and all the comforts of home would be hers.

and there determined I would part with my most precious possession if during the next week the clouds did not lift."

This costly gift, however, was not laid upon the family altar by the heroic girl. A friend who was ever ready to extend an unobtrusive helping hand when it was needed came to the rescue. Louisa, in relating this, said: "That was not the first time he had helped father, nor was it indeed the last."

Another incident that she told me that same evening in her inimitable way, with all its amusing and pathetic details, revealed to me how supreme was her loyalty and devotion to her family, and above all to her mother.

In 1850, when Louisa was eighteen years of age, Mrs. Alcott had, with the advice of friends, taken a position as visitor to the poor in Boston. She had also opened an intelligence office, where she often assisted gentlefolk reduced from affluence to poverty, to situations

Mrs. Alcott, who in spite of many bitter experiences in the past never lost her faith in people and was rather too apt to take them for what they seemed to be, tried to think of some one who would be glad of so pleasant a home as described. She turned to Louisa and asked her if

she could suggest any one. The reply came at once: "Only myself!" Great was her mother's surprise, and she exclaimed: "Do you really mean it, dear? "I really do, if Mr. R thinks I would suit." The clergyman smiled and said, "I am sure you would, and I feel that if we can secure you, we shall be most fortunate."

When Mrs. Alcott had recovered from her surprise, she prudently asked him what wages would be paid. The smooth reply was that the word "wages" must not be used, but any one who lent youth