Complete and unabridged, with 43 full-page plates by Mary Cassatt, Jasper Francis Cropsey and Albert Bierstadt. The stories Alcott wrote for the youngest readers: a Christmas dream that comes true, a candy country, a pair of skipping shoes, two children who run away to the farm, and a piggy girl who will not be washed. They were collected as a school reader after her death, from magazines and from "Lulu's Library", and are the gentlest thing under her name. The moralising is plain and the invention is better than the moralising deserves. Forty-three plates of nineteenth-century American painting, from Mary Cassatt's mothers and children to Eastman Johnson's country scenes, picture the same gentle domestic world the stories inhabit.