When she was almost sixteen, the family returned to Boston, and there Miss Alcott began to teach boys and girls their lessons.  She had not been at school much herself, but she had been instructed by her father and mother.  She had seen so much that was generous and good done by them that she had learned it is far better to have a kind heart and to do unselfish acts than to have riches or learning or fine clothes.  So, mothers were glad to send her their children to be taught, and she earned money in this way for her own support.

But she did not like to teach so well as her father did, and thought that perhaps she could write stories and be paid for them, and earn more money in that way.  So she began to write stories.  At first nobody would pay her any money for them, but she kept patiently at work, making better and better what she wrote, until in a few years she could earn a good sum by her pen.  Then the great civil war came on, and Miss Alcott, like the rest of the people, wished to do something for her country.  So she went to Washington as a nurse, and for some time she took care of the poor soldiers who came into the hospital wounded or sick, and she has written a little book about these soldiers which you may have read.  But soon she grew ill herself from the labor and anxiety she had in the hospital, and almost died of typhoid fever; since when she has never been the robust, healthy young lady she was before, but was more or less an invalid while writing all those cheerful and entertaining books.  And yet to that illness all her success as an author might perhaps be traced.  Her “Hospital Sketches,” first published in a Boston newspaper, became very popular, and made her name known all over the North.  Then she wrote other books, encouraged by the reception given to this, and finally, in 1868, five years after she left the hospital in Washington, she published the first volume of “Little Women.”  From that day to this she has been constantly gaining in the public esteem, and now perhaps no lady in all the land stands higher.  Several hundred thousand volumes of her books have been sold in this country, and probably as many more in England and other European countries.

Twenty years ago, Miss Alcott returned to Concord with her family, who have ever since resided there.  It was there that most of her books were written, and many of her stories take that town for their starting-point.  It was in Concord that “Beth” died, and there the “Little Men” now live.  Miss Alcott herself has been two or three years in Europe since 1865, and has spent several winters in Boston or New York, but her summers are usually passed in Concord, where she lives with her father and mother in a picturesque old house, under a warm hill-side, with an orchard around it and a pine-wood on the hill-top behind.  Two aged trees stand in front of the house, and in the rear is the studio of Miss May Alcott ("Amy"), who has become an artist of renown, and had a painting