improvement of his rustic manners. Mr. Alcott was
rather distinguished for his high-bred manners and, on a visit to
England, there is an amusing incident of his having been mistaken for
some member of the titled aristocracy.

At the age of twenty-five, Mr. Alcott began his career as a teacher in
an Episcopal Academy at Cheshire, Ct. His family were Episcopalians,
and he had been confirmed at sixteen. Since the age of eighteen when
he started for Virginia as a candidate for a school, he had been
theorizing upon the art of teaching and had thought out many of the
principles of what, a century later, began to be called the "New
Education." He undertook, perhaps too rapidly, to apply his theories
in the conduct of the Cheshire Academy. His experiments occasioned a
vast amount of controversy, in which Connecticut conservatism gained a
victory, and Mr. Alcott retired from the school at the end of two
years' service. His results however had been sufficient to convince
him of the soundness of his principles, and to launch him upon the
troubled career of educational reform.

Among a few intelligent friends and sympathizers who rallied to Mr.
Alcott's side in this controversy, was Rev. Samuel J. May, a Unitarian
minister then of Brooklyn, Ct., at whose house, in 1827, Mr. Alcott
met Mr. May's sister Abbie, who shared fully her brother's enthusiasm
for the new education and its persecuted apostle. Miss May began her
relations with Mr. Alcott as his admirer and champion, a dangerous
part for an enthusiastic young lady to play, as the sequel proved
when, three years later, she became Mrs. Alcott.

Mrs. Alcott was the daughter of a Boston merchant, Col. Joseph May,
and his wife, Dorothy Sewall, daughter of Samuel Sewall and his wife,
Elizabeth Quincy, sister of Dorothy Quincy, wife of John Hancock. By
the marriage of Joseph May and Dorothy Sewall, two very distinguished
lines of ancestry had been united. Under her father's roof, Mrs.
Alcott had enjoyed every comfort and the best of social advantages.
She was tall, had a fine physique, good intellect, warm affections,
and generous sympathies, but it would have astonished her to have been
told that she was bringing to the marriage altar more than she
received; and however much it may have cost her to be the wife of an
unworldly idealist, it was precisely his unworldly idealism that first
won her admiration and then gained her heart.

Life may have been harder for Mrs. Alcott than s