masters of Malta were, if all tales are true, a good deal more _militaires_ than monks. Eye-witnesses describe the knights as they sailed on a warlike expedition waving their hands to fair ladies on the shore. In their albergos or barracks the "Languages" lived luxuriously, and though dueling was strictly prohibited, there is a narrow street, the Strada Stretta, running parallel with the Reale, in which this extremely unecclesiastical mode of settling disputes was winked at. For by a pleasant fiction, any encounter within its limits was regarded as simply a casual difficulty occasioned by two fiery gentlemen accidentally jostling each other! Turning into the Strada Mercanti, the San Giacomio of a former nomenclature, we come upon more reminders of this picturesque brotherhood. For close by the Hospital for Incurables is the site of their cemetery, and farther up the steep street is the Military Hospital, which was founded by the Grand Master, Fra Luis de Vasconçelos. This infirmary, as an old writer tells us, was in former days "the very glory of Malta." Every patient had two beds for change, and a closet with lock and key to himself. No more than two people were put in one ward, and these were waited upon by the "Serving Brothers," their food being brought to them on silver dishes, and everything else ordered with corresponding magnificence. Nowadays, though scarcely so sumptuous, the hospital is still a noble institution, one of the rooms, four hundred and eighty feet in length, being accounted the longest in Europe. But there are no silver dishes, and the nurses have ceased to be of knightly rank. The University, an institution which turns out doctors with a celerity which accounts for the number of them in the island, is an even less imposing building than the public pawnbroking establishment hard by, and neither is so noteworthy as the market, which is remarkable from a literary point of view as being perhaps the only edifice in Valletta the founder of which has been content to inscribe his merits in the vulgar tongue. On the top of the hill, for we have been climbing all the time, is a house with a fine marble doorway, which also is the relic of the knights. For this building was the Castellania, or prison, and the pillory in which prisoners did penance, and the little window from above which prisoners were suspended by the hands, are still, with the huge hook to which the rope was attached, to be seen by those who are curious in such disciplinary matters. But like the rock-hewn dungeons in which the knights kept their two thousand galley-slaves, in most cases Turks and Moors who had fallen in the way of their war-ships, which still exist in the rear of the Dockyard Terrace, such reminders of a cruel age and a stern Order are depressing to the wanderer in search of the picturesque. He prefers to look at the Auberge of the Language of Italy, where the Royal Engineers have their quarters,