ooked back at the dear
faces watching me, so full of love, and hope, and faith."

Louisa Alcott's childhood and girlhood, with all the hardships and
joys which went into the passing years, had been merged in a
triumphant young womanhood--a fitting preface to the years of fame and
fortune which were to follow. A brave, interesting girl had become a
courageous older woman, who faced the untried future with her small
earnings in her pocket, her worldly goods in her trunk, and hopeful
determination in her heart to do some worth-while thing in the world,
for the sake of those she dearly loved. She had started up the steep
slope of her life's real adventuring, and despite the rough paths over
which she must still travel before reaching her goal, she was more and
more a sympathetic comrade to the weak or weary, ever a gallant
soldier, and a noble woman, born to do great deeds. So enthusiastic
was she in playing her part in the world's work, that when she was
twenty-seven years old, and still toiling on, with a scant measure of
either wealth or fame, she exclaimed at a small success:

"Hurrah! My story was accepted and Lowell asked if it was not a
translation from the German, it was so unlike other tales. I felt much
set up, and my fifty dollars will be very happy money.... I have not
been pegging away all these years in vain, and I may yet have books
and publishers, and a fortune of my own. Success has gone to my head,
and I wander a little.

"Twenty-seven years old and very happy!"

* * * * *

The prediction of "books, publishers and a fortune" came true in 1868,
when a Boston firm urged her to write a story for girls, and she had
the idea of describing the early life of her own home, with its many
episodes and incidents. She wrote the book and called it _Little
Women_, and was the most surprised person in the world, when from her
cozy corner of Concord she watched edition after edition being
published, and found that she had become famous. From that moment
Louisa Alcott belonged to the public, and one has but to turn to the
pages of her ably edited _Life, Letters and Journals_, to realize the
source from which she got the material for her "simple story of simple
girls," bound by a beautiful tie of family love, that neither poverty,
sorrow nor death could sever. Four little pilgrims, struggling onward
and upward through all the difficulties that beset them on their way,
in Concord, Boston,