enderly. "We cried over Beth, and
felt how strangely like most young housekeepers was Meg. How the tired
teacher, and tender-hearted nurse for the soldiers must have rejoiced
at her success! "This year," she wrote her publishers, "after toiling
so many years along the uphill road, always a hard one to women
writers, it is peculiarly grateful to me to find the way growing
easier at last, with pleasant little surprises blossoming on either
side, and the rough places made smooth."

When _Little Men_ was announced, fifty thousand copies were ordered in
advance of its publication! About this time Miss Alcott visited Rome
with her artist sister May, the "Amy" of _Little Women_, and on
her return, wrote _Shawl-straps_, a bright sketch of their journey,
followed by an _Old-Fashioned Girl_; that charming book _Under the
Lilacs_, where your heart goes out to Ben and his dog Sancho; six
volumes of _Aunt Jo's Scrap-bag_; _Jack and Jill_; and others.
From these books Miss Alcott has already received about one hundred
thousand dollars.

She has ever been the most devoted of daughters. Till the mother went
out of life, in 1877, she provided for her every want. May, the gifted
youngest sister, who was married in Paris in 1878 to Ernst Nieriker,
died a year and a half later, leaving her infant daughter, Louisa
May Nieriker, to Miss Alcott's loving care. The father, who became
paralyzed in 1882, now eighty-six years old, has had her constant
ministries. How proud he has been of his Louisa! I heard him say,
years ago, "I am riding in her golden chariot."

Miss Alcott now divides her time between Boston and Concord. "The
Orchards," the Alcott home for twenty-five years, set in its frame of
grand trees, its walls and doors daintily covered with May Alcott's
sketches, has become the home of the "Summer School of Philosophy,"
and Miss Alcott and her father live in the house where Thoreau died.

Most of her stories have been written in Boston, where she finds
more inspiration than at Concord. "She never had a study," says Mrs.
Moulton; "any corner will answer to write in. She is not particular
as to pens and paper, and an old atlas on her knee is all the desk she
cares for. She has the wonderful power to carry a dozen plots in her
head at a time, thinking them over whenever she is in the mood. Often
in the dead waste and middle of the night she lies awake and plans
whole chapters. In her hardest working days she used to write fourteen
hou