My father’s labors have often seemed to me like those of Hercules. He succeeded in them because he had great confidence in the benevolence of his fellow-men; he knew they would respond to appeals made in the right spirit, if matters were clearly explained. “Obstacles are things to be overcome,” was one of his mottoes. “_Qui facit per alium, facit per se_,” was another. So long as the deed was done, it mattered not to him who did it or who received the praise. If some one else could carry out his plan, he was off to the next task. He was too busy to give any time to the recording of his own accomplishments. Hence he had all the more for the work in hand. In 1866 came the stirring news of the revolt of Crete against her Mohammedan oppressors. The island had earned its freedom with the rest of Greece in the war of independence, but by a cruel stroke of diplomacy had been put back under the heel of the Turk. We shudder in the year 1918 at the cruelties of the Germans, the self-styled Huns. Yet they were once Christians and some remains of Christian thought and practice still linger among their soldiery. But the Turks have always been barbarians. In the early days of the rising of 1866–68 we learned with horror of the fate of the brave and desperate Cretans who, gathered together in church or fortress, blew themselves into eternity rather than fall into the savage hands of the Turks. Men did the same thing in the Greek revolution, to escape the same terrible fate! My father was now sixty-five years old. Yet “he heard the voice of Greece calling him,” and he answered the call, as he had answered it nearly half a century before. Then he had gone, in the enthusiasm of his bright youth, alone to a strange land, whose language he did not speak. _Now_ he at once called a meeting in Music Hall, Boston, where Edward Everett Hale, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Wendell Phillips, the silver-tongued orator, and others spoke. My father presided and made a brief speech: “I knew hundreds of them [the Cretans]—good men and true. I had been in their beautiful island, had stood a siege with them in one of their beleaguered fortresses, and witnessed their courage.... I see them now, the sons of my old companions, in their snowy chemise and their shaggy capote, saying, sadly, ‘Good-by, mother! Good-by, sister and child! Seek your refuge in the neighboring isles, upon the main, wherever the hand of Christian mercy may aid you. We go to the mountains to keep the flag of freedom flying as long as we live!’ My friends, these unfortunate women and children are now suffering as many of their mothers suffered forty years ago. Your fathers and your mothers relieved them. Will you not relieve their children?” Of course they would and did. Thirty-seven thousand dollars were raised, and in March, 1867, my father sailed for Greece, to be once more the almoner of American charity.