Mountain-Laurel and Maidenhair

By Louisa May Alcott

"Here's your breakfast, miss. I hope it's right. Your mother showed me how to fix it, and said I'd find a cup up here." "Take that blue one. I have not much appetite, and can't eat if things are not nice and pretty. I like the flowers. I've been longing for some ever since I saw them last night."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Start Publishing LLC
• Release date: Mar 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781625588975

Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. Born in Philadelphia to a family of transcendentalists—her parents were friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau—Alcott was raised in Massachusetts. She worked from a young age as a teacher, seamstress, and domestic worker in order to alleviate her family’s difficult financial situation. These experiences helped to guide her as a professional writer, just as her family’s background in education reform, social work, and abolition—their home was a safe house for escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad—aided her development as an early feminist and staunch abolitionist. Her career began as a writer for the Atlantic Monthly in 1860, took a brief pause while she served as a nurse in a Georgetown Hospital for wounded Union soldiers during the Civil War, and truly flourished with the 1868 and 1869 publications of parts one and two of Little Women. The first installment of her acclaimed and immensely popular “March Family Saga” has since become a classic of American literature and has been adapted countless times for the theater, film, and television. Alcott was a prolific writer throughout her lifetime, with dozens of novels, short stories, and novelettes published under her name, as the pseudonym A.M. Barnard, and anonymously.

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Mountain-Laurel and Maidenhair

By Louisa May Alcott

Start Publishing LLC

Copyright © 2012 by Start Publishing LLC

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

First Start Publishing eBook edition October 2012

Start Publishing is a registered trademark of Start Publishing LLC

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ISBN 978-1-62558-897-5

Mountain-Laurel and Maidenhair

Here’s your breakfast, miss. I hope it’s right. Your mother showed me how to fix it, and said I’d find a cup up here.

Take that blue one. I have not much appetite, and can’t eat if things are not nice and pretty. I like the flowers. I’ve been longing for some ever since I saw them last night.

The first speaker was a red-haired, freckled-faced girl, in a brown calico dress and white apron, with a tray in her hands and an air of timid hospitality in her manner; the second a pale, pretty creature, in a white wrapper and blue net, sitting in a large chair, looking about her with the languid interest of an invalid in a new place. Her eyes brightened as they fell upon a glass of rosy laurel and delicate maidenhair fern that stood among the toast and eggs, strawberries and cream, on the tray.

Our laurel is jest in blow, and I’m real glad you come in time to see it. I’ll bring you a lot, as soon’s ever I get time to go for it.

As she spoke, the plain girl replaced the ugly crockery cup and saucer with the pretty china ones pointed out to her, arranged the dishes, and waited to see if anything else was needed.

What is your name, please? asked the pretty girl, refreshing herself with a draught of new milk.

Rebecca. Mother thought I’d better wait on you; the little girls are so noisy and apt to forget. Wouldn’t you like a piller to your back? you look so kind of feeble seems as if you wanted to be propped up a mite.

There was so much compassion and good-will in the face and voice, that Emily accepted the offer, and let Rebecca arrange a cushion behind her; then, while the one ate daintily, and the other stirred about an inner room, the talk went on,—for two girls are seldom long silent when together.

I think the air is going to suit me, for I slept all night and never woke till Mamma had been up ever so long and got things all nicely settled, said Emily, graciously, when the fresh strawberries had been enjoyed, and the bread and butter began to vanish.

I’m real glad you like it: most folks do, if they don’t mind it being plain and quiet up here. It’s gayer down at the hotel, but the air ain’t half so good, and delicate folks generally like our old place best, answered Becky, as she tossed over a mattress and shook out the sheets with a brisk, capable air pleasant to