UNDER GREEK SKIES BY JULIA D. DRAGOUMIS NEW YORK E·P·DUTTON & COMPANY PUBLISHERS Copyright, 1913 BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY The Knickerbocker Press, New York TO MY THREE GRANDCHILDREN NICO AND ALEXANDRA YANNICOSTA AND NADINE RALLI I DEDICATE THIS BOOK A LETTER TO THE ONE WHO READS THIS BOOK Dear Little Schoolmate: If you have read the story of Pilarica and Rafael in sunny Spain, you know that these "Stories for Little Schoolmates" are being written about the child you might have been, if your father and mother--or your grandfathers and grandmothers--had stayed in Spain, or some other far country, instead of coming across the sea to live in America. "In Sunny Spain" told you what you might have been doing a few years ago, if you had been a Spanish child during the Cuban war; and now this new book will tell you how children work and play in Greece. There are not yet many school children with Greek names in the United States, for most of the Greeks who have come to America have been young unmarried men, or else like Ulysses they have left their wives and children in Greece and mean to go back to them. Of course you know about Ulysses and his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus. He is the hero of a long and delightful poem called the Odyssey, a Greek tale of wanderings and adventures by sea and land. There is a story about him in Hawthorne's "Tanglewood Tales" which I think you must have read; but if you haven't, why not read it now? These modern Greeks who love to sail away to new countries make me think of Ulysses, although their adventures are not always as exciting as his were. But lately, more and more of them are bringing their families across the sea, and that means that they will make America their home, and presently we shall have boys and girls with pretty Greek names, Constantine, and Iason, and Chryseis, in our schools.