Maria's Gift

How far is it from a rugged island in Greece to a coal-mining village in the Rocky Mountains? Farther than Maria could have imagined. More carts and boats and ships and trains and wagons and weeks of traveling than she could ever have dreamed.

And why had they made the journey? Maria did not know the answer. She knew tha in Greece they had been poor. She knew her father had said they must leave to find their fortune, but it seemed to her that if the family was better off all, it was by little indeed.

Maria's mother had died on the journey. Now Marial was the mother ot her brothers and sisters in their small shack. Each day she made her father's breakfast and a lunch for him to carry. She watched him set out with the other men toward the mine. Then she busied herself, doing what she could to raise the young ones.

She cooked and cleaned. She stitched and tended. Her life was hard. Somehow, however, she was not unhappy, for the mountains seemed to welcome her and she loved them. In summer, whenever there was some time with no work to be done, she would take the children to the high meadows and wander with them by the streams. In winter she would go outside and gaze toward the peaks.

As well she had her father's stories--the ones he told faithfully each evening no matter how tired he was from toiling with shovel and pick. They were the stories he had brought with him, and they made everyone feel better.

"You see!" he would say when the stories were finished. "There are such things as happy endings."