latter's moral sense through shame or pity. This was, doubtless,
rather interesting to the pupils, whether or not it was corrective.
Mr. Alcott's peculiarities did not stop here, however, and Boston
parents, when he began to publish the _Colloquies on the Gospels_
which he held with their children, concluded, on the evidence thus
furnished, that his thought was too "advanced" to make it prudent to
trust them longer to his care. Miss Elizabeth P. Peabody, since so
well known as an expositor of the Kindergarten system, had been his
assistant. She wrote a _Record of Mr. Alcott's School_ which
attracted the attention of a small band of educational enthusiasts in
England. They gave the name of "Alcott House" to a school of their
own at Ham, near London, and hoped for great things from the personal
advice and presence of the "Concord Plato." He was petted and fêted
among them pretty nearly to the top of his bent; but his visit would
have proved a more unalloyed success if the hard Scotch sense of
Carlyle, to whom Emerson had recommended him, had not so quickly
dubbed his vaunted depths deceptive shallows.

On his return he was accompanied by two Englishmen who seemed to be
like-minded with himself, a Mr. H. G. Wright and Mr. Charles Lane,
both of whom returned within a year or two to their own country,
wiser and perhaps sadder men. Lane, at all events, who was a simple
and candid soul for whom Isaac Hecker conceived a long-enduring
friendship, sunk all his private means irrevocably in the futile
attempt to establish Fruitlands on a solid basis. To use his own
words in a letter now at our hand, though referring to another of Mr.
Alcott's schemes, his little fortune was "buried in the same grave of
flowery rhetoric in which so many other notions have been deposited."

Lying before us there is an epistle--Mr. Alcott's most ordinary