But the bootblacks who come to America are not so well taken care of as those who stay in Athens. Perhaps if their fathers and mothers knew what a hard life they were to lead in the United States they would not send them. But I am quite sure that little Constantine and Aleko and the others come eagerly, and are proud to be able to help support the family. Poor little fellows! They are hired out--sold is nearer the truth--for a certain number of years, to some older, craftier countryman who has an American shoe-blacking parlour; and there they work all day, and far into the night, with never a holiday. Our Government is trying to put a stop to this hard life, and there is a law which says that children under sixteen must not come to America without their parents; but these persistent little fellows do get in, somehow. Ever since the Greeks got inside the walls of Troy town, hundreds of years ago, by hiding inside a great wooden horse, they have found it easy to make their way into other people's cities whenever they wished to. But now that Greek men are beginning to bring their wives and families with them to America, perhaps the little bootblacks will not have such a hard time, for their parents will find out how badly they have been treated. Perhaps also, now that Greeks are making a second home in America, they will no longer think only of what they can get out of her, but will want to give as well as to get. We cannot make a home without giving something to it; every bird who builds a nest knows that. And the Greeks have great gifts which America needs. They have the gift of beauty. If you live in New York or Boston or Chicago, or any other city where there is an Art museum, no doubt you often go on Saturday afternoons to see the casts of famous statues in the museum,--there may even be a cast hanging on your school-room wall,--and you know that the most beautiful statues, and the most famous, are those which the Greeks made, hundreds of years ago. With all our added years of skill and knowledge we have never been able to make any statues more beautiful than those early Grecian ones. If the Greeks bring us this gift of beauty, surely America must some day be a beautiful place to live in, free from crowded tenements, and lovely with fair dwellings. And the gift of wisdom is theirs; for no philosophers are greater than those ancient Greeks, Socrates and Plato; no poets are greater than Homer, who told the story of Ulysses, or Æschylus who wrote a play about how Prometheus brought fire from heaven and gave it to man. Some day I hope you will read some of this Greek poetry and philosophy; you will never be a really well-educated man, or woman, unless you do.