Some years ago we had taken our passage for Alexandria on board a packet from Valletta. The Ægyptus, spick and span new from the Toulon dockyard, with the tricolor flaunting over her stern all resplendent with gilded sphynxes, lay, steam up and ready for departure, near the centre of the Great Harbour, amid that glorious cluster of cities which the knights of St John reared round the banner of the Cross, when Christendom was forced to shorten her cords and draw in her outposts before the swelling power of the unbelievers. Berth selected, baggage stowed away, and hour of dinner ascertained, we were at leisure to enjoy the familiar but never palling glories of the sky and scenery, and to amuse ourselves in watching the travellers of various nations who, party by party, mounted the deck, speculating the while on whatever promised in the first aspect of those who were to be our messmates on the five days' voyage. They were not numerous or very interesting--a party of French artists, bloused and bearded, who returned from their brief circuit of Valletta as full of the stalwart figures and novel costume of its garrison (the Forty-Second) as of the picturesque grandeur of its palaces, or the Titanic sublimity of its bulwarks--a grey-haired English veteran proceeding to his divisional command in India, with wife and daughters, and a most ante-Napierian baggage-train, received by M. le Commandant with scowling courtesy, as if the stately dame were _perfide Albion_ in proper person--then one or two half-Frenchified Moslems, returning from their studies in Paris with a complement of Western vice and science--and lastly, in coarse brown robe, sandalled feet, and shaven crown, with shining breviary beneath the arm, three Capuchin monks, going forth to make disciples for Holy Church in the far East. Each of the latter had his trunk--one of those lanky, hog-backed articles in which the continental European rejoices--and on the trunk his name and destination painted. Two, if we remember, were bound for Agra--the destination of the third we never can forget. On his coffer the painter had inscribed, as coolly, we daresay, as a railway porter would ticket your portmanteau for York or Glasgow, "FR. ANASTASIO TIBET." "It is a far cry to Loch Ow;" and whether brother Anastasius and his long pack ever reached their destination as per ticket we know not. But Tibet and its capital have since been visited by two brethren of his Church, though not of his order; and we have to thank Mr Prinsep for calling attention to their narrative in the very able abstract which he has published.[8] [8] _Souvenirs d'un Voyage dans la Tartarie, le Thibet, et la Chine, pendant les années 1844, 1845, et 1846._ Par M. HUC, Prêtre-Missionaire de la Congregation de Saint Lazare. Paris, 1850.