Life would have been far less easy for him but for the development of an unexpected talent in one of his daughters, Louisa May Alcott. From her sixteenth year, Louisa Alcott had been writing for publication, but with little success, although every dollar she earned was welcome to a family so poor that the girls sometimes thought of selling their hair to get a little money. She also tried to teach, and finally, in 1862, went to Washington as a volunteer nurse and labored for many months in the military hospitals. The letters she wrote to her mother and sisters were afterwards collected in a book called "Hospital Sketches." At last, at the suggestion of her publishers, she undertook to write a girls' story. The result was "Little Women," which sprang almost instantly into a tremendous popularity, and which at once put its author out of reach of want. Other children's stories, scarcely less famous, followed in quick succession, forming a series which has never been equalled for long-continued vogue. Few children who read at all have failed to read "Little Men," "Little Women," "An Old-Fashioned Girl," "Eight Cousins," and "Rose in Bloom," to mention only five of them, and edition after edition has been necessary to supply a demand which shows no sign of lessening. The stories are, one and all, sweet and sincere and helpful, and while they are not in any sense literature, they are, at least, an interesting contribution to American letters. But to return to the Transcendentalists. The most picturesque figure of the group was Margaret Fuller. Starting as a morbid and sentimental girl, her father's death seems suddenly to have changed her, at the age of twenty-five, into a talented and thoughtful woman. Her career need not be considered in detail here, since it was significant more from the inspiration she gave others than from any achievement of her own. She proved herself a sympathetic critic, if not a catholic and authoritative one, and a pleasing and suggestive essayist. What she might have become no one can tell, for her life was cut short at the fortieth year. She had spent some years in Italy, in an epoch of revolutions, into which she entered heart and soul. A romantic marriage, in 1847, with the Marquis Ossoli, served further to identify her with the revolutionary cause, and when it tumbled into ruins, she and her husband escaped from Rome and started for America. Their ship encountered a terrific storm off Long Island, was driven ashore, broken to pieces by the waves, and both she and her husband were drowned. [Illustration: EMERSON]