tures of her characters are often not
so much invented as remembered, the pranks and frolics of her boys
and girls being episodes from her own youthful experience. In the
preface to "Little Women," the most charming of her books, she tells
us herself that the most improbable incidents are the least imaginary.
The happy girlhood which she portrays was her own, in spite of
forbidding conditions. The struggle in which her cheerful nature
extorted happiness from unwilling fortune, gives a dramatic interest
to her youthful experiences, as her literary disappointments and
successes do to the years of her maturity.

Miss Alcott inherited a name which her father's genius had made known
on both sides of the sea, before her own made it famous in a hundred
thousand households. Alcott is a derivative from Alcocke, the name by
which Mr. Alcott himself was known in his boyhood. John Alcocke, born
in New Haven, Ct., married Mary, daughter of Rev. Abraham Pierson,
first president of Yale College. He was a man of considerable fortune
and left 1,200 acres of land to his six children, one of whom was
Capt. John Alcocke, a man of some distinction in the colonial service.
Joseph Chatfield Alcocke, son of Capt. John, married Anna, sister of
Rev. Tillotson Bronson, D.D. Of this marriage, Amos Bronson Alcott,
father of Louisa, was born, Nov. 29, 1799. The fortunes of Joseph
Chatfield Alcocke were those of other small farmers of the period, but
Mrs. Alcocke could not forget that she was the sister of a college
graduate, and it was worth something to her son to know that he was
descended from the president of a college. The mother and son early
settled it that the boy should be a scholar, and the father loyally
furthered their ambitions, borrowing of his acquaintances such books
as he discovered and bringing them home for the delectation of his
studious son. At the age of thirteen, Bronson became a pupil in a
private school kept by his uncle, Dr. Bronson, and at eighteen, he set
out for Virginia with the secret purpose of teaching if opportunity
offered, at the same time taking along a peddler's trunk out of which
to turn an honest penny and pay the expenses of his journey.
Circumstances did not favor his becoming a Virginia teacher, but
between his eighteenth and twenty-third years, he made several
expeditions into the Southern States as a Yankee peddler, with rather
negative financial results, but with much enlargement of his
information and