the occasion of his house taking fire, were thrown unceremoniously out of the window into the yard.
"As I stood guarding the scorched, wet pile," she says, "Mr. Emerson passed by, and surveying the devastation with philosophical calmness, only said in answer to my lamentations, 'I see my library under a new aspect. Could you tell me where my good neighbors have flung my boots? '"
It was in Concord, in a pretty summer-house which Mr. Alcott had built for his daughters near a brook, that Miss Alcott first tried composing stories, but only to amuse her sisters and friends. When she was sixteen they all went back to Boston to live, and there she began to teach school. It was not a pleasant occupation to her, and, ere long, she ventured to offer a story to a Boston newspaper. She has herself related, in an interesting letter to the Saturday Evening Gazette, how it fared with her in her early attempts to write for publication.
"I still have," she wrote, "a very vivid recollection of the mingled hope and fear with which I sent my second story to try its fate in a newspaper. My first appeared in Ballou's Pictorial Museum, and the five dollars paid for it was the most welcome money I ever earned. 'The Rival Prima Donnas' fared still better, for it brought me ten dollars and a request for more; at which delightful news the heart of the young authoress sang for joy: and she set bravely forth along the literary lane, which for twenty years showed no sign of turning.
"I always considered this tale a very successful one, not only because it was so hospitably received, but because when dramatized, at a hint from the kind friend who said a good word for me, both to editor and manager, it was accepted by Mr. Barry of the Boston Theatre. The ladies who were to play the prima donnas were actually rivals on the stage, and between the two the
