The next olive season, the olive trees in the orchard bore more fruit than they had ever given; the fine cultivating they had had from the digging brought so much fruit, and of so fine a quality, that when it was sold it gave the sons a whole pot of gold!

And when they saw how much money had come from the orchard, they suddenly understood what the wise father had meant when he said, “There is gold hidden in the orchard; dig for it.”

MARGARET OF NEW ORLEANS

If you ever go to the beautiful city of New Orleans, somebody will be sure to take you down into the old business part of the city, where there are banks and shops and hotels, and show you a statue which stands in a little square there.  It is the statue of a woman, sitting in a low chair, with her arms around a child, who leans against her.  The woman is not at all pretty:  she wears thick, common shoes, a plain dress, with a little shawl, and a sun-bonnet; she is stout and short, and her face is a square-chinned Irish face; but her eyes look at you like your mother’s.

Now there is something very surprising about this statue:  it was the first one that was ever made in this country in honor of a woman.  Even in old Europe there are not many monuments to women, and most of the few are to great queens or princesses, very beautiful and very richly dressed.  You see, this statue in New Orleans is not quite like anything else.

It is the statue of a woman named Margaret.  Her whole name was Margaret Haughery, but no one in New Orleans remembers her by it, any more than you think of your dearest sister by her full name; she is just Margaret.  This is her story, and it tells why people made a monument for her.

When Margaret was a tiny baby, her father and mother died, and she was adopted by two young people as poor and as kind as her own parents.  She lived with them until she grew up.  Then she married, and had a little baby of her own.  But very soon her husband died, and then the baby died, too, and Margaret was all alone in the world.  She was poor, but she was strong, and knew how to work.

All day, from morning until evening, she ironed clothes in a laundry.  And every day, as she worked by the window, she saw the little motherless children from the orphan asylum, near by, working and playing about.  After a while, there came a great sickness upon the city, and so many mothers and fathers died that there were more orphans than the asylum could possibly take care of.  They needed a good friend, now.  You would hardly think, would you, that a poor woman who worked in a laundry could be much of a friend to them?  But Margaret was.  She went straight to the kind Sisters who had the asylum and told them she was going to give them part of her wages and was going to work for them, besides.  Pretty soon she had worked so hard that she had some money saved from her wages.  With this, she bought two cows and a little delivery cart.  Then she carried her milk to her customers in the little cart every morning; and as she went, she begged the left-over food from the hotels and rich houses, and brought it back in the cart to the hungry children in the asylum.  In the very hardest times that was often all the food the children had.