pined,
but most of them promise to do well. Each mother cherishes and shows her
little beggar in the approved way. The children are usually robust,
although showing in their appearance the very limited resources of their
parents. Some of the women have tolerable gowns; to these we give only
underclothing. Others have but the rag of a gown--a few strips of stuff
over their coarse chemises. These we make haste to cover with the
beneficent growth of New England factories. They are admitted in groups
of three or four at a time. As many of us fly to the heaps of clothing,
and hastily measure them by the length and breadth of the individual. A
papa, or priest, keeps order among them. He wears his black hair uncut,
his narrow robe is much patched, and he holds in his hand a rosary of
beads, which he fingers mechanically.

"The dresses sent did not quite hold out, but sufficed to supply the
most needy, and, in fact, the greater number. Of the underclothes we
carried back a portion, having given something to every one. To an old
papa who came, looking ill and disconsolate, I sent two shirts and a
good dark woolen jacket. Among all of these only one discontented old
lady demurred at the gift bestowed. She wanted a gown; but there was not
one left, so that she was forced to content herself, much against her
will, with some underclothing. The garments supplied, of which many were
sent by the Boston Sewing Circle, under the superintendence of Miss Abby
W. May, proved to be very suitable in pattern and quality. As we
descended the steps we met with some of the children, already arrayed in
their little clean shirts, and strutting about with the inspiration of
fresh clothing, long unfelt by them....

"Despite the velvet flatteries and smiling treasons of diplomacy, the
present government of Greece is, as every government should be, on its
good behavior before the people. Wonderfully clever, enterprising, and
liberal have the French people made the author of the 'Life of Julius
Caesar.' Wonderfully reformative did the radicals of 1848 make the Pope.
And the Greek nation, taken in the large, may prove to have some common
sense to impart to its symbolical head, of whom we can only hope that
the 'something rotten in the state of Denmark' may not have been taken
from it to corrupt the state of Greece."

But it was not through one sense alone that I received in Athens the
delight of a new enchantment. My ear drank in the music of the Greek