[Illustration] [Illustration] [Illustration] For Louisa 1839 My Daughter, You are Seven years old to-day and your Father is forty. You have learned a great many things, since you have lived in a Body, about things going on around you and within you. You know how to think, how to resolve, how to love, and how to obey. You feel your Conscience, and have no real pleasure unless you obey it. You cannot love yourself, or anyone else, when you do not mind its commandments. It asks you always to BE GOOD, and bears, O how gently! how patiently! with all endeavors to hate, and treat it cruelly. How kindly it bears with you all the while. How sweetly it whispers Happiness in your HEART when you Obey its soft words. How it smiles upon you, and makes you Glad when you Resolve to Obey it! How terrible its PUNISHMENTS. It is GOD trying in your soul to keep you always Good. You begin, my dear daughter, another year this morning. Your Father, your Mother, and Sisters, with your little friends, show their love on this your Birthday, by giving you this BOX. Open it, and take what is in it, and the best wishes of Your Father. Beach Street, Friday morning, Nov. 29, 1839. His explanation to a seven-year-old girl that conscience is "God in your soul," and the lines, "since you have lived in a body," are eloquent manifestations of his belief. It is not surprising that, given such thoughts at seven, Louisa at ten or eleven wrote that she was sure in some previous life she must have been a horse,--she loved so to run. A month before May Alcott was born, little Louisa, then eight, again away from home, received this letter from her father: [Illustration] [Illustration] [Illustration] [Illustration] Cottage, Sunday June 21st, 1840. We all miss the noisy little girl who used to make house and garden, barn and field, ring with her footsteps, and even the hens and chickens seem to miss her too. Right glad would father and mother, Anna and Elizabeth, and all the little mates at School, and Miss Russell, the House Playroom, Dolls, Hoop, Garden, Flowers, Fields, Woods and Brooks, all be to see and answer the voice and footsteps, the eye and hand of their little companion. But yet all make themselves happy and beautiful without her; all seem to say, "Be Good, little Miss, while away from us, and when we meet again we shall love and please one another all the more; we find how much we love now we are separated."