多莉·帕顿去世了。她最看重的不是那几千首歌，是每个月寄到孩子门口的一本书。

Last Tuesday, Dolly Parton died in the United States, aged eighty, of cancer.

She sang for more than sixty years and wrote thousands of songs.

But she said the thing she valued most was books.

In 1995, she started doing something very small.

She began mailing one book a month to every child in the county where she was born.

From the first day of life until the fifth birthday.

Five years, sixty books, all free, with no regard for whether the family had money.

The book comes from the post office with the child's own name printed on it.

For a three-year-old, that may be the first thing he has ever received with his own name on it.

Why did this start?

Because of her father.

Her father was a man from the Tennessee mountains. He never had the chance to go to school, and he could not read his whole life.

She once said: my father is the smartest man I know.

The smartest man, and he could not read a single sheet of paper his whole life.

So what she did was make sure other people's children would not have to walk his road.

Later that one county became five countries, and more than three hundred million books have gone out.

In America, of children under five, one in every six is receiving them.

Her father lived to seventy-nine.

Before that, he heard children call her, to her face, "the book lady".

She said he was over the moon about it, and felt that a part of it was his.

Now she is gone.

The program put out a statement that said only one thing: the books keep going.

Next month, still one, still free.

Think about it:

After a person is gone, what still turns up at strangers' doors every month?