And this, after their fashion, the American missionaries do set forth and illustrate. Their merits and demerits I am not here to discuss. How much of polite culture, of sufficient philosophy, goes with their honest purpose, it is not at this time my business to know or to say. Neither is their special theology mine. They believe in a literal atonement, while I believe in the symbolism which makes a pure and blameless sufferer a victim offered in behalf of his enemies. They look for a miraculous, I for a moral regeneration. They make Christ divine of birth, I make him simply divine of life. Their dogmas would reconcile God to man, mine would only reconcile man to God. Finally, they revere as absolute and divine a book which I hold to be a human record of surpassing thoughts and actions, but with the short-comings, omissions, and errors of the human historiographer stamped upon them. With all this diversity of opinion between the church of their communion and that of mine, I still honor, beyond all difference, the Protestant cause for which they stand in Greece, and consider their representation a just and genuine one.
In writing this I have had in mind the three dissenting missionaries, Messrs. Kalopothaki, Constantine, and Zacularius. The older mission of Dr. and Mrs. Hill is an educational one. I believe it to have borne the happiest fruits for Greece. Whenever I have met a scholar of Mrs. Hill, I have seen the traces of a firm, pure, and gentle hand—one to which the wisest and tenderest of us would willingly confide our daughters. In raising the whole scale of feminine education in Greece, she has applied the most potent and subtle agent for the elevation of its whole society. She herself is childless; but she need scarcely regret it, since whole generations are sure to rise up and call her blessed.
Dr. Hill is at present chaplain to the English embassy, at whose chapel he preaches weekly. Mrs. Hill and himself seem to stand in very harmonious relations with Athenian society, as well as with the travelling and visiting world.
The missionaries preach and practise with unremitting zeal. They also publish a weekly religious paper. Their wives labor faithfully in the aid and employment of the Cretan women and children, and, I doubt not, in other good works. But of these things I have now told the little that I know.
THE PIAZZA.
Venice has a Piazza, gorgeous with shops, lights, music, and, above all, the joyous life of the people. Athens also has a Piazza, bordered with hotels and cafés, with a square of trees and flowering shrubs in the middle. It lies broadly open to the sun all day long, and gives back his rays with a torrid refraction. When day declines, the evening breezes sweep it refreshingly. Accordingly, as soon as the shadows permit, the spaces in front of the cafés—or, in Greek, cafféneions—are crowded with chairs and tables, the chairs being filled by human beings, many of whom have ripened, so far as the head goes, into a fez—have unfolded, so far as the costume goes, into pali-kari petticoats and leggings. Between the two hotels is mortal antipathy. Ours—"Des Etrangers"—has taken the lead, and manages to keep it. The prices of the other are lower, the cuisine much the same, the upper windows set to command a view of the Acropolis, which is in itself an unsurpassable picture. Where the magic resides which keeps our hotel full and the other empty, I know not, unless it be in the slippery Eastern smile of the landlord—an expression of countenance so singular that it inevitably leads you, from curiosity, to follow it further. In our case it led to no profound of wickedness. We were not cheated, nor plundered, nor got the better of in any way that I remember. Our food was good, our rooms proper, our charges just. Yet I felt, whenever I encountered the smile, that it angled for me, and caught me on a hook cunningly baited.
I must say that our landlord was even generous. Besides our three meals per diem,—which grew to be very slender affairs, so far as we were concerned,—we often required lemonades and lokumia, besides sending of errands innumerable. For these indulgences no extra charge was made. In an Italian, French, or English hotel, each one of them would have had its penitentiary record. So the mystery of the smile must have had reference to matters deeply personal to its wearer, and never made known to me.
The cafés seemed to maintain a thrifty existence. But one of them took especial pains to secure the services of a band of music. Hence, on the evenings when the public band did not play, emanated the usual capriccios from Norma, Trovatore, and the agonies of Traviata. Something better and worse than all this was given to us in the shape of certain ancient Greek or Turkish melodies, obviously composed in ignorance of all rules of thorough-bass, with a confusion of majors and minors most perplexing to the classic, but interesting to the historic sense. I rejoiced especially in one of these, which bore the same relation to good harmony that Eastern dress bears to good composition of color. It was obviously well liked by the public, as it was usually played more than once during the same evening.
Before the shadows grew quite dark, a barouche or two, with ladies and livery, would drive across the Piazza, giving a whiff of fashion like the gleam of red costume that heightens a landscape. And the people sat, ate and drank, came and went, in sober gladness, not laughing open-mouthed—rather smiling with their eyes. From our narrow hotel balcony we used to look down and wonder whether we should ever be cool again. For though the evenings were not sultry, their length did not suffice to reduce the fever of the day. And the night within the mosquito-nettings was an agony of perspiration. I now sit in Venice, and am cool; but I would gladly suffer something to hear the weird music, and to see the cheerful Piazza again. Yet when I was there, for ten minutes of this sea-breeze over the lagoons I would have given—Heaven knows what. O Esau!