HAPPINESS reigned in the Alcott home, and poverty seldom brought with it a shadow. The girls had toys and a variety of them,--rag dolls, kittens, gingerbread men, and barnyard animals (the latter skillfully cut out of cake dough by the mother, who had a genius for inventing surprises). As they grew older, they delighted in private theatricals. Some of their plays, written by Anna and Louisa, have been published under the title of "Comic Tragedies." They are thrillingly melodramatic, thickly sprinkled with villains and heroes, witches and ruffians, lovely ladies in distress, gallant knights to the rescue, evil spirits and good fairies, gnomes and giants. All are direfully tragic and splendidly spectacular. Louisa as a child showed the dramatic quality which later found artistic expression in her stories. On a rainy afternoon the children were never at a loss for entertainment. They "acted" in the attic or played dolls in their own playroom, and such dolls! Old Joanna, of whom Louisa has drawn a lifelike picture in "Little Women," is to-day in existence, battered, scarred, but none the less precious, one foot carefully bandaged, after the army-nurse method. Poverty was made interesting. At Christmas a tree was hung with apples, nuts, and popped corn, and small trifles made by the children were fastened to the branches. Father and mother made much of the spirit of the Christ birthday, which was celebrated in simple, wholesome fashion, in vivid contrast to the modern Christmas festival. The Alcott letters and journals show tremendous intellectual activity on the part of the small atoms of humanity who came to grace the Alcott home. Anna and her father held moral and intellectual discussions when Anna was four. Louisa was writing a daily journal before she could more than print. As soon as a child could read, family reproofs were administered by notes from father and mother to the erring one, not only pointing out the fault, but how to correct it. The father encouraged his daughters to study themselves and to write down their thoughts. Their journals, in consequence, reflect the characteristics of each one and are storehouses of information. Louisa, poor little soul, in her happy, hoydenish childhood, found time one day in a fit of mentality to set down in black and white her chief faults. One of her most serious, according to the self-imposed confession, was "love of cats," a sin which easily beset her all her days, for she inherited her father's love of animals and of children.