who stood his ground, though the effort was unsuccessful. He had also stood his ground in a protest against the trial of Anthony Burns. A group had broken down the door of the Boston courthouse but guards beat them back. Alcott stood forward and asked the leader of the group, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "Why are we not within?" He then walked calmly into the courthouse, was threatened with a gun, and turned back, "but without hastening a step", according to Higginson. In 1862, Louisa moved to Washington, D.C. to volunteer as a nurse. On January 14, 1863, the Alcotts received a telegram that Louisa was sick; Bronson immediately went to bring her home, briefly meeting Abraham Lincoln while there. Louisa turned her experience into the book Hospital Sketches. Her father wrote of it, "I see nothing in the way of a good appreciation of Louisa's merits as a woman and a writer." Henry David Thoreau died on May 6, 1862, likely from an illness he caught from Alcott two years earlier. At Emerson's request, Alcott helped arrange Thoreau's funeral, which was held at First Parish Sanctuary in Concord, despite Thoreau having disavowed membership in the church when he was in his early twenties. Emerson wrote a eulogy, and Alcott helped plan the preparations. Only two years later, neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne died as well. Alcott served as a pallbearer along with Louis Agassiz, James T. Fields, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and others. With Hawthorne's death, Alcott worried that few of the Concord notables remained. He recorded in his journal: "Fair figures one by one are fading from sight." The next year, Lincoln was assassinated, which Alcott called "appalling news". In 1868, Alcott met with publisher Thomas Niles, an admirer of Hospital Sketches. Alcott asked Niles if he would publish a book of short stories by his daughter; instead, he suggested she write a book about girls. Louisa May was not interested initially but agreed to try. "They want a book of 200 pages or more", Alcott told his daughter. The result was Little Women, published later that year. The book, which fictionalized the Alcott family during the girls' coming-of-age years, recast the father figure as a chaplain, away from home at the front in the Civil War. Alcott spoke, as opportunity arose, before the "lyceums" then common in various parts of the United States, or addressed groups of