And yet the opening years of that new century found Mary Christmas in ways of pleasantness which the late nineties had been reluctant to promise her. Indeed, she might well have cried with the Psalmist, perchance of her own hill pastures: “The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage.” Slowly but steadily she had built up a reputation for herself among a people by nature skeptical of the “foreigner,” and in districts far from Utopian for peddlers of all sorts. Although she had in no small measure the shrewdness of her race, all suspicion of dishonesty, rife upon her early appearance, had been dispelled by an openness in her business dealings, almost childlike in its simplicity. Attendant upon this was a ready understanding of the whims and prejudices of her customers, a happy faculty which forbade the tenacity of the average seller, but was quick to suggest a substitute for whatever was refused. Aiding these assets to good business and yet transcending them all was her larger, more bountiful self, which, once met with on the common way, was never to be forgotten, and which now, as then, beggars all attempts at description. She manifested, even to dull people, an almost overwhelming prodigality of nature. Her energy was tireless and apparently incapable of consumption. It carried her over miles of country, sometimes in a drenching rain, and left her at nightfall at the back door of some upland farm, whose unwilling inhabitants grudgingly offered her the hayloft as a bedchamber and in an hour were taking down the newspapers from the windows of the spare room. It lent a buoyancy to her tired feet when during her first months as a traveler she had left the main road for an outlying house, only to be turned away at the gate. It prompted her in long stretches of woodland to sing the folk songs of her people--songs of Vartan, who saved Armenia from the worship of fire, and of the Virgin, on whose festival the ripening grapes are blessed by a holy cross. It made her never too tired to talk or to play with children. In its gracious strength she dreamed dreams and saw visions: dreams of the day when she should bring her children to this kind, new land; visions of herself, behind a red pushcart with stout, well-oiled wheels, convenient apartments for small accessories, and a thick rubber cover, protective against bad weather. Who shall say that it sprang from a superabundance of physical well-being alone? Surely such power breathed of the spiritual, and suggested the generosity of God on the day of her creation.