M arch 1885. The Library Committee of Concord, Massachusetts, after grave deliberation, announces decision to bar from its shelves book deemed unfit to rub bindings with the volumes of Mr. Emerson Mr. Thoreau; such trash, states the report, is suitable only for the slums. The committee has given us rattling tip-top puff, exults the author of Huckleberry Finn. That will sell 25,000 copies for us sure. Stung as he undoubtedly was by the rebuff, S. L. Clemens was determined to brazen it out. Those idiots in Concord are not court of last resort, he fulminated, and I am not disturbed by their gymnastics.'1 According to one revered Concord author, If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads lasses, he had best stop writing for them.2 A year later this same writer was to finish Jo's Boys, the last of her novels for lads lasses. There, in feat of gymnastics, Louisa May Alcott, through the character of Jo March Bhaer, adjudged herself to be a literary nursery-maid affixed to the pure-minded fiction she had censured Clemens for not writing tag he himself might have invented: moral pap for the young.3 March 1885. Racked by vertigo headaches, her writing hand gripped by pain, running along the edge of break-