Beside “The Star” and “The Golden Sun,” where you drink “the best beer under the sun,” we find “The Moon,” especially “The Half-Moon,” as great favorites of the people. The naval victory of 1571 at Lepanto, where the united Christian fleet destroyed The Turk,--in those days not a sick man, but rather a robust and aggressive one,--is perhaps the cause of the popularity of the half-moon. The Virgin Mary, to whom the pious sailors ascribed the victory, was often represented as standing on a half-moon, because she was “the woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars” whom the poet of the Revelation had seen in his immortal dreams. Crowned with her diadem of stars she was dear to the seamen, the “_stella maris_,” to whom they lifted their anguished soul in prayer: “Ave Maria, navigantium stella, quos ad portum tranquillum vocata conducis.” As “light of the world” she was praised in the old “dialogus consolatorius” where the sinner humbly begs her:-- “Festina miseris misereri, virgo beata! Virgo Maria pia splendens orbisque lucerna Per tua presidia nos duc ad regna beata!” But it is not the half-moon, lying horizontally as a silver bowl in the Christian presentation of the heavenly queen, which we find on the tavern sign, but always the standing crescent of the Turkish flag, and we are glad of it. If we study the life in these half-moon taverns at the hand of Teniers’ pictures and etchings, we find very little that is Christian and worthy of the sacred symbol of the Revelation.