Page:Daughters of Genius.djvu/89

 somewhat after the pattern of Brook Farm, where each was to do his fair share of Labor for the common good. It failed, of course, and the failure furnished the material for Miss Alcott's amusing story, entitled "Transcendental Wild Oats."

The family then returned to Concord, where they spent three years in the house afterwards occupied by Hawthorne. It was about this time that Miss Alcott became acquainted with Ralph Waldo Emerson, to whom she frequently refers in her works, always with a peculiar mingling of tenderness and reverence. She went to school for some time with his children in their father's barn, and she draws a pleasant picture of the illustrious philosopher taking a merry company of young folks, crowded into a gayly decorated hay-wagon, to bathe, gather berries, or picnic at Walden Pond. He made a delightful play-fellow, and always found pleasant nooks for them in the woods and meadows, and told them wonderful stories of the woodland pets of his friend Thoreau, upon whose shoulder the wild birds would light fearlessly, and who could dip his hand into the pond and lift it out with a shining fish lying in the palm. When she grew older and was seized by the "book-mania," as she calls it, she used to haunt his library and ask him to recommend to her books to read, always inquiring for something new and very interesting, and seldom failing, through his patient help, to find it. Sometimes, when she wished to try something far above her girlish comprehension, he would advise her to wait awhile for that, and offer something else to take its place.

"For many of these wise books," she adds, "I am waiting still, very patiently, because in his own I have found the truest delight, the best inspiration of my life."

She tells, too, with humorous relish, a characteristic anecdote of her kind and great friend, whose books, on