A love for all of God's creations characterized him. He was fond, not only of the growing things in the wood, but of all life. His love for animals amounted almost to a passion, one reason for his being a strict vegetarian and insisting upon bringing up his little family on a vegetable diet. But in boyhood it was not always clear whether humanity or the craving for knowledge made him so considerate of the plodding team in the field. Never was team more carefully tended. Many were its hours of grazing, when the noonday sun rode high in the heavens, and the Alcott boy, book in hand, curled up under the shade of a gigantic elm and read until the shadows began to lengthen. But these lapses were only occasional, for the lad was faithful to his tasks, except when he yielded to the lure of the printed page. When scarcely more than a child he began to keep a record of his books and his reading, showing the first traces of the reflective, introspective quality of mind which later led him to set down in letters and unpublished manuscripts his inmost thoughts. He cultivated the same habits of thought in his children, one reason, doubtless, for Louisa's accurate and realistic descriptions of the lives of the four Little Women of the Alcott family. His favorite books in boyhood, and, for that matter, in manhood, were the Bible and Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," which he read and reread and commented upon. Years later he mentions in his journal that he made it a practice to read "Pilgrim's Progress" every year, which is a remarkable record to the modern boy and girl who find it difficult to struggle through that wonderful allegory even once. Bronson Alcott took his chance and made a stepping-stone of every difficulty. Each obstacle he encountered in getting an education created in him an even stronger determination to gain one. The modern boy has the world of books opened wide to him through the library and the free school. The treasures of art are spread out before him in the museums. He is surrounded by helps. The boy of to-day is studied as an entity. The boy of the last century could tell quite a different story. So the Alcott boy, passing long hours in the woods, reading, thinking, getting close to Nature and to God, walked as one apart, seeing the invisible. While still a boy, he began casting off the garment of a conventional creed and to think for himself of God, the creation, of life, unconsciously putting from him the trammeling, cumbersome conventions with which man has often hidden truth. Out of this the man Alcott emerged--a great soul. II THE ALCOTT MAN