I here insert some passages from a book of travels, in which I recorded the impressions of this first visit to Greece. The work was published soon after my return to Boston, and was named "From the Oak to the Olive." "Here is the Temple of Victory; within are the bas-reliefs of the Victories arriving in the hurry of their glorious errands. Something so they tumbled in upon us when Sherman conquered the Carolinas, and Sheridan the valley of the Shenandoah, when Lee surrendered, and the glad President went to Richmond. One of these Victories is untying her sandal, in token of her permanent abiding. Yet all of them have trooped away long since, scared by the hideous havoc of barbarians. And the bas-reliefs, their marble shadows, have all been battered and mutilated into the saddest mockery of their original tradition. The statue of Wingless Victory that stood in the little temple has long been absent. But the only Victory that the Parthenon now can seize or desire is this very Wingless Victory, the triumph of a power that retreats not--the power of Truth.... "Poor Greece, plundered by Roman, Christian, and Mussulman! Hers were the lovely statues that grace the halls of the Vatican--at least, the loveliest of them. And Rome shows to this day two colossal groups, of which one bears the inscription, 'Opus Praxitelæ,' the other that of 'Opus Phidiæ.' And Naples has a Greek treasure or two, one thinks, besides her wealth of sculptural gems, of which the best are of Greek workmanship. And in England those bas-reliefs, which are the treasure of art students and the wonder of the world, were pulled from the pediment of the Parthenon, like the pearly teeth from a fair mouth, the mournful gaps remaining open in the sight of the unforgiving world. 'Thou art old and decrepit,' said England. 'I am still in strength and vigor. All else has gone, as well thy dower as thy earnings. Thou hast but these left. I want them, so give them me.'... "We were ushered into a well-sized room, in which lay heaps of cotton underclothing and of calico dresses, most of them in the shape of sacks and skirts. These were the contents of one or two boxes recently arrived from Boston. Some of them were recognized by me as the work of a hive of busy bees who used to gather weekly in my own New England parlor, summoned thither by my daughter Florence, now Mrs. David P. Hall. And what stress there was at those meetings, and what hurrying! And how the little maidens took off their feathery bonnets and dainty gloves, wielding the heavy implements of cutting, and eagerly adjusting the arms and legs, the gores and gathers! With patient pride the mother trotted off to the bakery, that a few buns might sustain these strenuous little cutters and sewers, whose tongues, however active over the charitable work, talked, we may be sure, no empty nonsense nor unkind gossip.