Athens, March 29. We arrived yesterday at Piraeus, more dead than alive, on the _Prince Abbas_, a cockleshell that brought us from Alexandria. Things are no better to-day on the Mediterranean boats than when Lord Byron made his memorable trip on board the Lisbon packet! Mr. Cook, or his agent, plucked us and our baggage out of that dark hold where we had languished many days and seated us, a demoralized party, in a comfortable landau. We each drooped languidly in our corner, our spines damp macaroni. Gradually limp vertebrae stiffened up, heads lifted, eyes opened. We were restored by the elixir of the air, the color of the sky and fields. At a turn in the road, before we were quite prepared for it, came the first view of the Acropolis. Half a lifetime had passed since I had left it, and it has only grown in beauty. Athens is much improved. The roads are better, the streets cleaner, the whole city better kept than I remembered it. The people look prosperous; there is a general air of well-being in all classes. We hurried to the Acropolis, where we found the old immortal glories and much that was new and interesting in the small museum behind the Parthenon. The two most precious objects of Greek art which the last twenty years’ research has brought to light, you are familiar with,--the Victory untying her sandal and the Hermes of Olympia. The museum contains curious archaic statues discovered buried in a deep trench. The theory is that in the age of Pericles and the consummate art of the sculptors of that time, these earlier sacred statues of earthenware and painted stone were dethroned and decorously interred in the sacred soil of the Acropolis. It does seem a little shabby to unearth these poor discarded gods and tuck them away as curiosities in a little shed behind the temple of Athena Parthena, where they once reigned supreme! We sat on the steps of the Parthenon and watched the sky change from blue to purple and gold, waiting for the moment when the violet mist rose up out of the sea and draped Mount Hymettus with a veil.