George F. Hoar: “There is no such thing as a blind fate; no such thing as an overwhelming and pitiless destiny.”

We speak of a light that makes darkness visible; and similarly there are sounds that deepen the long intervals of silence with which they alternate.

We are here in the sweet silence of a summer morning, eighteen hundred years after such a scene, and able mentally to catch some glimpse of it; some echo of the storm that has left behind it so ineffaceable a mark.

We bring you a more costly and precious gift than any jewel or diadem, though it came from an Emperor's treasury.

And the Greeks, in turn, owed their astronomy to the Egyptians, with whom the year was reckoned as of three hundred and sixty days; and this three hundred and sixty-day year gives us the clue to the forty-day period for holding the Forest…