Around a little cape appear huge convents, with sparkling gold domes. They are beautiful and desolate. The faith of the Eastern peoples has raised these kremlins in the name of Christ, and the setting sun wraps them in a fire more radiant than the kremlin of Moscow. Splendid color bathes the mountain and its cluster of religious buildings. As if to view the picture better, the _Waldeck-Rousseau_ draws away; it moves between the sun, hung in a glory of rose-color, and Mount Athos, shimmering under the caress of the light. With its cliffs shining and its ravines filled with colors, it seems alive, and changes like a poignant harmony of violins. Into the summit, the frosts of December have driven a nail of snow, which catches the changing smiles of the sun and reflects them, soft and tender, into space. In a few moments the violet color takes possession of the sky; then it fades imperceptibly, and the _Waldeck-Rousseau_, for this night of the voyage, sails on in a religious atmosphere. That man is to be pitied who is not moved by the enchantment of Nature, or who does not know the great lessons of history. He is ignorant of those pleasures that never fade. For fifteen days the Ionian Sea has been surrendering to me its secret of our inheritance from the Greeks. Mount Athos and this fair evening reveal to me another heritage, that bequeathed by Jesus Christ. Long ago from the deserts of Palestine a voice was lifted among the Roman multitude. It brought back to earth those transcendant archangels whom the children of Cain had banished. The archangels are named Goodness and Justice. I will not pursue the story of their martyrdom here on earth. Like harmless little animals at bay before ferocious beasts, they have suffered; their hearts and bodies have bled; and the wicked boast that they have driven them from the world. But a nation was found to receive these two trembling angels in her maternal hands. She revived them in her bosom; from their lovely touch she got the courage to suffer, and as the first Christians threw themselves to the torture rather than deny the Divine Master, so France for more than a century, has been willing to die in behalf of her love for Liberty and Justice. In the month of August, 1914, with sword on high and bosom bare, she defied anew the perpetrators of cruelty. Her people and her ministers were not mistaken. Whether unbelievers or religious men, their gospel and their justification are those of the Galilean. It is indeed from His divine parables, and not from the decrees of the old Germanic god, that France has gathered the flower which is planted in her crest. White and incorruptible, this flower has closed its petals during the weeks through which we are living; but the German foulness shall not soil it, the shells shall not cut its stem, and the dawn is not distant when its opened petals will shed over the world a sweet fragrance.