th reference to the wants of
the laboring class of England, at a time when they were as ignorant as
our negroes are now."

The picture of her southern life which she gives in a letter to George
Eliot, is very attractive, her husband "sitting on the veranda reading
all day," but during these years, Mrs. Stowe must have spent much of
her own time at a writing-table since, for the ten years after 1867,
when the Florida life began, she published a volume, sometimes two
volumes, a year. In 1872, she was tempted by the Boston Lecture Bureau
to give readings from her own works in the principal cities of New
England, and the following year, the course was repeated in the cities
of the West. Her audiences were to her amazing. "And how they do
laugh! We get into regular gales," she writes her lonely husband at
home.

Her seventieth birthday was celebrated at a gathering of two hundred
of the leading literary men and women of the land, at the residence of
Ex-Governor Claflin in Newton. There were poems by Whittier, Dr.
Holmes, J. T. Trowbridge, Mrs. Whitney, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Mrs.
Fields, and others, many excellent speeches, and finally a speech by
the little woman herself. This garden party, says her son, was the
last public appearance of Mrs. Stowe.

Her "rabbi" left her a widow in 1886, dying at the age of 84. Mrs.
Stowe survived him ten years, dying in 1896, at the age of 85, leaving
behind her a name loved and honored upon two continents.

VII

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT

[Illustration: LOUISA MAY ALCOTT]

Miss Alcott has been called, perhaps truly, the most popular
story-teller for children, in her generation. Like those elect souls
whom the apostle saw arrayed in white robes, she came up through great
tribulation, paying dearly in labor and privation for her successes,
but one must pronounce her life happy and fortunate, since she lived
to enjoy her fame and fortune twenty years, to witness the sale of a
million volumes of her writings, to receive more than two hundred
thousand dollars from her publishers, and thereby to accomplish the
great purpose upon which as a girl she had set her heart, which was,
to see her father and mother comfortable in their declining years.

Successful as Miss Alcott was as a writer, she was greater as a woman,
and the story of her life is as interesting,--as full of tragedy and
comedy,--as the careers of her heroes and heroines. In fact, we have
reason to believe that the adven