This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children's eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea... if you gazed intently enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset. About half-way between the Florida shore and the golden collar a white steam-yacht, very young and graceful, was riding at anchor and under a blue-and-white awning aft a yellow-haired girl reclined in a wicker settee reading The Revolt of the Angels, by Anatole France.
She was about nineteen, slender and supple, with a spoiled alluring mouth and quick gray eyes full of a radiant curiosity. Her feet, stockingless, and adorned rather than clad in blue-satin slippers which swung nonchalantly from her toes, were perched on the arm of a settee adjoining the one she occupied. And as she read she intermittently regaled herself by a faint application to her tongue of a half-lemon that she held in her hand. The other half, sucked dry, lay on the deck at her feet and rocked very gently to and fro at the almost imperceptible motion of the tide.
The second half-lemon was well-nigh pulpless and the golden collar had grown astonishing in width, when suddenly the drowsy silence which enveloped the yacht was broken by the sound of heavy footsteps and an elderly man topped with orderly gray hair and clad in a white-flannel suit appeared at the head of the companionway. There he paused for a moment until his eyes became accustomed to the sun, and then seeing the girl under the awning he uttered a long even grunt of disapproval.
If he had intended thereby to obtain a rise of any sort he was doomed to disappointment. The girl calmly turned over two pages, turned back one, raised the lemon mechanically to tasting distance, and then very faintly but quite unmistakably yawned.

As long ago as 1860 it was the proper thing to be born at home. At present, so I am told, the high gods of medicine have decreed that the first cries of the young shall be uttered upon the anaesthetic air of a hospital, preferably a fashionable one. So young Mr. and Mrs. Roger Button were fifty years ahead of style when they decided, one day in the summer of 1860, that their first baby should be born in a hospital. Whether this anachronism had any bearing upon the astonishing history I am about to set down will never be known.
I shall tell you what occurred, and let you judge for yourself.
The Roger Buttons held an enviable position, both social and financial, in ante-bellum Baltimore. They were related to the This Family and the That Family, which, as every Southerner knew, entitled them to membership in that enormous peerage which largely populated the Confederacy. This was their first experience with the charming old custom of having babies - Mr. Button was naturally nervous. He hoped it would be a boy so that he could be sent to Yale College in Connecticut, at which institution Mr. Button himself had been known for four years by the somewhat obvious nickname of "Cuff."...

- Natale non sembrerà più Natale senza regali - brontolò Jo sdraiata sul tappeto dinanzi al caminetto.
- L’essere poveri è una disgrazia - disse Meg, guardando con un sospiro il suo vecchio vestitino.
- Non è giusto che alcune ragazze debbano aver tanto ed altre nulla! - soggiunse la piccola Amy con voce piagnucolosa.
- Abbiamo però la nostra buona mamma ed il nostro papà e tante altre belle cose - disse Beth dal suo cantuccio.
Le quattro faccine, illuminate dai bagliori del fuoco che scoppiettava nel caminetto, si rischiararono un momento a queste parole, ma si oscurarono di nuovo allorché Jo disse con tristezza: - Papà non è con noi e chi sa quando tornerà! - Non disse - forse mai - ma tutte lo aggiunsero silenziosamente, pensando al padre loro tanto lontano, là, sul campo di battaglia.
Tutte tacquero per qualche istante, poi Meg ricominciò: - Sapete bene la ragione per cui la mamma ha proposto di non comprare regali per Natale. Essa crede che non abbiamo diritto di spendere i nostri denari in divertimenti quando i nostri cari nell’esercito soffrono tanto. Non siamo buone a molto noi, ma possiamo pur fare i nostri piccoli sacrifizi e dovremmo compierli con piacere, per quanto io confessi che mi costano qualche fatica - e Meg scosse la testa ripensando alle belle cosine che da tanto tempo desiderava.
- Ma non credo che quel poco che daremmo possa alleggerire le sofferenze dell’esercito; un misero dollaro non potrà far gran cosa. Sono d’accordo anch’io di non aspettarmi nulla né dalla mamma né da voialtre, ma vorrei, con i miei pochi risparmi, comperarmi Undina e Sintram! È tanto tempo che lo desidero! - disse Jo, che aveva una vera passione per la lettura.
- Io aveva pensato di comprarmi un po’ di musica! - disse Beth, con un sospiro così leggiero che nessuno potè udirlo.