THE SECRET OF THE BLACK BOX; A simple black box and its secrets are one family´s most presius possession.

    The first years of my life were spent in small settlements along the sandy Sabine River in east Texas. My father was a preacher, and every few years we moved from one village to another. We lived in parsonages. We never owner a home. In this and some other ways we were different from the other members of the community.

     In the place we lived when I was in my third year of school, my best friend was Jhon , and we often   walked home from school together. One day, as we neared Jhon`s house, he pointed towar it. "My grandfather built that house 70 years ago," he said, "And when I grow up and get married, my father says I`m to have it."

     I stared though the fence at the tall, old-fashioned house. How wonderful, I though for an instant, to be the owner of a house like that! What claim could I possibly make that would equal Jhon`s?

     The Black Box

     Then I remembered something. "Well, I don`t care," I said, "my family has a black box!"  And suddenly I kew, thinking of the black box my mother kept locked inside the china closet, that I really didn`t care. There had been at least one rich family in every town where we had lived. Now I knew that I had never envied any of them.

     Though the true meaning of the black box would not be know to me for years, I felt I was richer than anyone I knew.

     Our Prize Possession

     I ran all the way home that afternoon, went to the china closet and stool staring at the black box. It was no bigger than a shoe box, but there was something special about it, something precius wich for some reason I believed was mine alone.

     Just when the box came to be so importan to me, I do not really know. I merely know that the box is among my earliest memories. I was youngest of seven children. I remember winter evenings when I played on the kitchen floor while my mothere washed the supper dishes with the help of Mary and Elizabeth. "Now, girls," my mother said to them one evening, "if the house should catch fire in the nigth, save the black box. Your father and I will take care of the children. Break the glass in the china closet and take the box. Every thing else can burn. But get that box!"

       In the nex post :  THE TREASURE REVEALED

       Adapted from The Secret of the Black Box, by Kenneth Robb

   The Reader`s Digest, march `51