any kind. However, as has been said, the English residents did not give them selves much trouble about the matter. There was not enough of them to get up a little parochial society, like that which flourishes in so many English colonies, gossiping with the best, and forging anew for themselves those chains of a small community which everybody pretends to bate. her work, which had got to such a pitch of impossibility, that her lips were dry and wide apart from the strain of excitement with which she struggled with her subject, when the bell tinkled where it hung outside upon the stairs, sending a little jar through all the Palazzo, where bells were very uncommon; and presently Tasie Durant, pushing open the door of the salone, with a breathless little Per messa came out upon the loggia in her usual state of haste, and with half-a-dozen small books tumbling out of her hand. and precipice: and for the amazing blue of the water, with its ribbon-edge of paler colors, and the deep royal purple of the broad surface, and the white sails thrown up against it, and the white foam that turned up the edges of every little wave. But in the mean time she was not think ing of them, nor of the infinitely varied lines of the mountains, or the specks of towns, each with its campanile shining in In the afternoon of the day on which the sun, which gave character to all; but the encounter recorded in the previous of the palms on which her attention was chapter had taken place, Frances sat in fixed, and which, however beautiful they the loggia alone at her work. She was sound, or even look, are apt to get very busy with her drawing — a very elaborate spiky in a drawing, and so often will not study of palm-trees, which she was mak"come" at all. She was full of fervor in ing from a cluster of those trees which were visible from where she sat. A loggia is something more than a balcony; it is like a room with the outer wall or walls taken away. This one was as large as the big salone out of which it opened, and had therefore room for changes of position as the sun changed. Though it faced the west, there was always a shady corner at one end or the other. It was the favorite place in which Frances carried on all her Occupations where her father came to watch the sunset, where she had tea, with that instinct of English habit and tradi tion which she possessed without knowing how. Mr. Waring did not much care for her tea, except now and then in a fitful way; and Mariuccia thought it medicine. But it pleased Frances to have the little table set out with two or three old china cups which did not match, and a small silver teapot, which was one of the very few articles of value in the house. Very rarely, not once in a month, had she any occasion for these cups; but yet, such an occasion did occur at long intervals; and in the mean time, with a pleasure not much less infantine, but much more wistful than that with which she had played at having a tea-party seven or eight years before, she set out her little table now. She was seated with her drawing materials on one table and the tea on another, in the stillness of the afternoon, looking out upon the mountains and the sea. No; she was doing nothing of the sort. She was looking with all her might at the clump of palm-trees within the garden of the villa, which lay low down at her feet between her and the sunset. She was not indifferent to the sunset. She had an admiration which even the humblest arttraining quickens, for the long range of coast, with its innumerable ridges running down from the sky to the sea, in every variety of gnarled edge and gentle slope 66 Never mind, dear; they are only books for the Sunday school. Don't you know we had twelve last Sunday? Twelve ! think! when I have thought it quite large and extensive to have five. I never was more pleased. I am getting up a little library for them like they have at home. It is so nice to have everything like they have at home. 66 Like what?" said Frances, though she had no education. "Like they have—well, if you are so particular, the same as they have at home. There were three of one family think! Not little nobodies, but ladies and gentlemen. It is so nice of people not just poor people, people of education, to send their children to the Sunday school." "New people?" said Frances. 66 Yes; tourists, I suppose. You all scoff at the tourists; but I think it is very good for the place, and so pleasant for us to see a new face from time to time. Why should they all go to Mentone? Mentone is so towny, quite a big place. And papa says that in his time Nice was everything, and that nobody had ever heard of Mentone." "Who are the new people, Tasie?" Frances asked. 66 They are a large family — that is all I know; not likely to settle, more's the pity - oh no. Quite well people, not even a delicate child," said Miss Durant regret fully; "and such a nice domestic family, always walking about together. Father and mother and governess and six children. They must be very well off, too, or they could not travel like that, such a lot of them, and nurses and I think I heard, a courier too." This, Miss Durant said in a tone of some emotion; for the place, as has been said, was just beginning to be known, and the people who came as yet were but pioneers. "I have seen them. I wonder who they are. My father" said Frances; and then stopped and held her head on one side, to contemplate the effect of the last touches on her drawing; but this was in reality because it suddenly occurred to her that to publish her father's acquaintance with the stranger might be unwise. 66 Your father?" said Tasie. "Did he take any notice of them? I thought he never took any notice of tourists. Haven't you done those palms yet? What a long time you are taking over them! Do you think you have got the color quite right on those stems? Nothing is so difficult to do as palms, though they look so easy: except olives; olives are impossible. But what were you going to say about your father? Papa says he has not seen Mr. Waring for ages. When will you come up to see us?" "It was only last Saturday, Tasie." "Week," said Tasie. "O yes; I assure you; for I put it down in my diary: Saturday week. You can't quite tell how time goes, when you don't come to church. Without Sunday, all the days are alike. I wondered that you were not at church last Sunday, Frances, and so did mamma." "Why was it? I forget. I had a headache, I think. I never like to stay away. But I went to church here in the village instead." "O Frances! I wonder your papa lets you do that. It is much better when you have a headache to stay at home. I am sure I don't want to be intolerant, but what good can it do you going there? You can't understand a word." "Yes, indeed I do, many words. Ma riuccia has shown me all the places; and it is good to see the people all saying their prayers. They are a great deal more in earnest than the people down at the Ma rina, where it would be just as natural to dance as to pray." Ah, dance!" said Tasie, with a little sigh. "You know there is never anything of that kind here. I suppose you never VOL. XLIX. 2520 LIVING AGE. was at a dance in your life. - unless it is in summer, when you go away?" "I have never been at a dance in my life. I have seen a ballet, that is all." "O Frances, please don't talk of any. thing so wicked. A ballet! that is very different from nice people dancing - from dancing one's own self with a nice partner. However, as we never do dance here, I can't see why you should say that about our church. It is a pity, to be sure, that we have no right church; but it is a lovely room, and quite suitable. If you would only practise the harmonium a little, so as to take the music when I am away. I never can afford to have a headache on Sunday," Miss Durant added in an injured tone. "But Tasie, how could I take the harmonium, when I don't even know how to play?" "I have offered to teach you, till I am tired, Frances. I wonder what your papa thinks, if he calls it reasonable to leave you without any accomplishments? You can draw a little, it is true; but you can't bring out your sketches in the drawing. room of an evening, to amuse people; and you can always play "When you can play." "Yes, of course that is what I mean; when you can play. It has quite vexed me often to think how little trouble is taken about you; for you can't always be young, so young as you are now. And suppose some time you should have to go home - to your friends, you know?" Frances raised her head from her drawing and looked her companion in the face. "I don't think we have any friends," she said. 66 "O my dear, that must be nonsense," cried Tasie. "I confess I have never heard your papa talk of any. He never says my brother,' or 'my sister,' or 'my brother-in-law,' as other people do; but then he is such a very quiet man; and you must have somebody-cousins at least; you must have cousins; nobody is without somebody," Miss Durant said. "Well, I suppose we must have cousins," said Frances. "I had not thought of it. But I don't see that it matters much; for if my cousins are surprised that I can't play, it will not hurt them; they can't be considered responsible for me, you know." Tasie looked at her with the look of one who would say much if she could wistfully and kindly, yet with something of the air of mingled importance and reluctance with which the bearer of ill news hesitates before opening his budget. She had indeed no actual ill news to tell, only the burden of that fact of which everybody felt Frances should be warned that her father was looking more delicate than ever, and that his "friends" ought to know. She would have liked to speak, and yet she had not courage to do so. The girl's calm consent that probably she must have cousins was too much for any one's patience. She never seemed to think that one day she might have to be dependent on these cousins; she never seemed to think But after all, it was Mr. Waring's fault. It was not poor Frances that was to blame. "You know how often I have said to you that you ought to play, you ought to be able to play. Supposing you have not any gift for it, still you might be able to do a little. You could so easily get an old piano, and I should like to teach you. It would not be a task at all. I should like it. I do so wish you would begin. Drawing and languages depend a great deal upon your own taste and upon your opportunities; but every lady ought to play." - Tasie (or Anastasia; but that name was too long for anybody's patience) was a great deal older than Frances; so much older as to justify the hyperbole that she might be her mother; but of this fact she herself was not aware. It may seem absurd to say so, but yet it was true. She knew, of course, how old she was, and how young Frances was; but her faculties were of the kind which do not perceive differences. Tasie herself was just as she had been at Frances's age the girl at home, the young lady of the house. She had the same sort of occupations. to arrange the flowers; to play the harmonium in the little colonial chapel; to look after the little exotic Sunday school; to take care of papa's surplice; to play a little in the evenings when they "had people with them;" to do fancy work, and look out for such amusements as were going. It would be cruel to say how long this condition of young ladyhood had last ed, especially as Tasie was a very good girl, kind and friendly and simple-hearted, and thinking no evil. Some women chafe at the condition which keeps them still girls when they are no longer girls; but Miss Durant had never taken it into her consideration. She had a little more of the housekeeping to do, since mamma had become so delicate; and she had a great deal to fill up her time, and no leisure to think or inquire into her own position. It was her position, and therefore the best position which any girl could have. She had the satis faction of being of the greatest use to her parents, which is the thing of all others which a good child would naturally desire. She talked to Frances without any notion of an immeasurable distance between them, from the same level, though with a feeling that the girl, by reason of having had no mother, poor thing, was lamentably backward in many ways, and sadly blind, though that was natural, to the hazard of her own position. What would become of her if Mr. Waring died? Tasie would sometimes grow quite anx ious about this, declaring that she could not sleep for thinking of it. If there were relations—as of course there must be — she felt that they would think Frances sadly deficient. To teach her to play was the only practical way in which she could show her desire to benefit the girl, who, she thought, might accept the suggestion from a girl like herself, when she might not have done so from a more authoritative voice. Frances on her part accepted the suggestion with placidity, and replied that she would think of it, and ask her father; and perhaps if she had time But she did not really at all intend to learn music of Tasie. She had no desire to know just as much as Tasie did, whose accomplishments, as well as her age and her condition altogether, were quite evident and clear to the young creature, whose eyes possessed the unbiased and distinct vision of youth. She appraised Miss Durant exactly at her real value, as the young so constantly do, even when they are quite submissive to the little conventional fables of life, and never think of asserting their superior knowledge; but the conversation was suggestive, and beguiled her mind into many new channels of thought. The cousins unknown, should she ever be brought into intercourse with them, and enter perhaps a kind of other world through their means; would they think it strange that she knew so little, and could not play the piano? Who were they? These thoughts circled vaguely in her mind through all Tasie's talk, and kept flitting out and in of her brain, even when she removed to the tea-table and poured out some tea. Tasie always admired the cups. She cried: "This is a new one, Frances. Oh, how lucky you are! What pretty bits you have picked up!" with all the ardor of a collector. And then she began to talk of the old Savona pots, which were to be had so cheap, quite cheap, but which she heard at home were so much thought of. Frances did not pay much attention to the discourse about the Savona pots; she went on with her thoughts about the cousins, and when Miss Durant went away, gave herself up entirely to those specula tions. What sort of people would they be? Where would they live? And then there recurred to her mind the meeting of the morning, and what the stranger said who knew her father. It was almost the first time she had ever seen him meet any one whom he knew, except the acquaint ances of recent times, with whom she had made acquaintance, as he did. But the stranger of the morning evidently knew about him in a period unknown to Frances. She had made a slight and cautious attempt to find out something about him at breakfast, but it had not been successful. She wondered whether she would have courage to ask her father now in so many words who he was and what he meant. From Blackwood's Magazine. history of hospitals; the soldier reads with the same enthusiasm which Walter Scott gratefully records in reference to his early studies of the Abbé Vertot, the animated narrative of the sieges of Rhodes and Malta, the greatest leaguers of their respective epochs; and the politician is interested in a constitution alien to any other in the world's history—the autocratic authority of a military chieftain, tempered by democratic equality of the convent. Yet, after all, it is to the scene of the zenith of their glory and the decay of their spirit, that the English student of the history of the Knights Hospitallers will ever turn; so that they are in our minds, as in popular parlance, less chevaliers of Jerusalem or of Rhodes than knights of Malta. It is a slight indica tion of this substitution of the genius loci for the esprit de corps, that General Porter in his earlier pages appears to surrender a point which, to a genuine old miles Hierosolymitanus, would have been dearer than his own genealogical proofs, describing the dedication of the original chef lieu of the order at Jerusalem as having been to St. John the Almoner, against which degradation of the convent of the illustrious Precursor the learned Paciaude, in the work which he dedicated under Grand Master Pinto to Pope Benedict XIV. (in 1755), protests in lengthy and ener getic sentences, striving to show that it was a fallacy, hatched by the envy of the Greeks. Clearly, if the Almoner appears to nineteenth-century acumen the proper patron for an order of Hospitallers, it was not long before he was altogether disowned by the fraternity, and the Bap tist invested with the tradition of their IT is a strange irony of fate which has made the English - dubbed by the first Napoleon a nation of shopkeepers - the heirs of the haughty, fastidious, chivalric Hospitallers; and, stranger still, that the last link in the chain of circumstances which led to this unlooked-for result, was forged by the high-handed enterprise of the great Corsican himself. Neverthe less, it is unquestionably true that we are indebted in no small degree to the reli-earliest consecration. In St. John's gious fanaticism which tempered the stern savagery of the Middle Ages for the possession of our great Mediterranean arsenal. The history of the Knights of the Hospital of St. John at Jerusalem is the history of one of our most valuable dependencies. Many years ago General Porter contributed to our literature the best and most readable summary of the deeds of the order in a book of which he has now published an enlarged and revised edition, with, we may hope, a prospect of a wider popularity in this age of extended reading. The subject, indeed, sparkles with many facets of interest. The medical man finds light thrown upon the early Church at Valetta, in addition to the famous gift of Bajazet, the hand of the Baptist, - captured by the Turks at Constantinople, whither it had been conveyed by Constantine Porphyrogenitus, after he had bribed a deacon to steal it from Antioch, - other relics hardly less sacred were deposited, of which Paciaude gives representations. The grand possession, the actual ministrant of the baptism of the Saviour, in a case richly jewelled, was seized by Buonaparte, who, transferring to his own finger the gem which sparkled on the dead hand, desired the case to be taken on board the "Orient," and care. lessly observed to Hompesch, "You may keep the carrion," which he did, and handed the relic over to the emperor Paul at St. Petersburg, where it still shares the reverence of devout visitants, with another famous relic from Malta - the icon of our | lies the dockyard creek, at that time conLady of Philermos to which, in the true spirit of modern ultramontanism, the papal Order of St. John seem to pay their principal regard, to the neglect of their once venerated patron saint. It is no wonder that the Order of St. John have to us mainly a national interest as the possessors of Malta. Had they settled at Genoa, where the merchant princes were most anxious to attract them where, indeed, was established one of the most flourishing commanderies, and where, in a chapel of the cathedral from which the female sex (as sisters of Herodias's daughter) are rigidly excluded, you may see the Byzantine casket which once held the ashes of the Precursor; or had they remained at Syracuse, where they repaired for a while after the taking of Rhodes, and sculptured Grand Master d'Amboise's arms on the wall of the palazzo now used as a museum, - few would have cared about them, except an antiquarian or two; but even the most prosaic passenger by the Peninsular and Oriental line, cannot resist an inquiry as to the builders of the stately city, at the foot of whose stupendous ramparts his vessel is anchored; while politicians and ethnologists, in the pursuit of their respective hobbies, constantly come across the legends of the soldier monks, to whose halls, docks, and fortresses we have succeeded. A few words on the former topic, the city of Valetta, may not be out of place. As seen from the deck of an eastward-bound steamer, it is the modern town which faces the anchorage - for the P. and O. ships go into the Marsamuscetto harbor; and in the days of the great siege, the ridge of high ground on which the present city, built by the contributions of all Christendom in obedience to the bull of Pope Pius IV., stands, was a rocky peninsula with a solitary fort at the extreme end, the harbor's mouth, the fort being named St. Elmo after the patron of mariners and not only the scene of incalculable bravery and self-sacrifice during the siege, but interesting as the spot to which Abercromby, while it was still in the hands of the French, with a prescience of its future, desired his body to be transported when he fell in the hour of victory. The town which the Turks aimed at destroying stood upon the two central promontories of the opposite side of the "grand harbor," flanked by the French creek on the landward, and the bay below the Naval Hospital at Bighi, on the seaward side; while between the peninsulas taining the slips on which the galleys were laid up, protected by a strong chain drawn across the mouth of the bay between the Castles of St. Angelo and St. Michael. The Turks, after the fall of St. Elmo, brought their fleet into the Marsamuscetto harbor, and drawing some ships across the promontory at the landward end, below Floriana, launched them on the upper bay of the "grand harbor," and thus completely invested the two strong. holds of the order by sea; while from Corradino, Zabbar, Bighi, Ricasoli, and the lower St. Elmo, they raked the fortifi cations from the land by a nearly complete circle of batteries. The traveller, viewing the scene of the conflict from the height above (the upper Barracca), and reading that the Turkish army numbered forty thousand, might well wonder that they did not, to quote Hushai the Arcbite (2 Samuel xvii. 13) “bring ropes to that city and draw it into the water, until there be not one small stone found there." And so, indeed, in spite of the most heroic endurance and bravery on the part of the knights, they would have done, but for the ineradicable sloth and indiscipline of an Oriental force. They neglected to seize, as they could at first readily have done, Citta Vecchia, the capital of the island, a few miles inland; from whence a small garrison constantly harassed their rear by unexpected attacks, one of which at least saved the besieged by creating a diversion at the very moment when their storming party were on the point of success, having planted their horsetail standards on the summit of the walls. One of the most graphic and interesting, although little known, narratives of the events of the great siege, was printed at Perugia in 1567, by F. John Anthony Viperan, who had served in the garrison of the capital. His chronicle gives us to understand how imperfectly, in spite of the cordon of troops and batteries, the Moslem blockaded the town. Reinforcements found their way to St. Angelo through the Turkish lines; and even within a few weeks of the termination of the siege, an emissary, sent by the viceroy of Sicily to report upon the state of affairs in Malta, traversed the enemy's intrenchments, between dawn and sunrise, with a small escort, and without a challenge from a sentinel or an interruption from a patrol. Indeed, but for the jealousies which sundered the councils of Christendom, a more frightful calamity than that which actually befell the besiegers might have |
