The island of Gozo rose up out of the sea on the fourth day--a yellow rib of rock on the right, with houses and temples on it--and demonstrated how few days of water are necessary to rob one's memory of the usual look of a house. One would imagine by the general interest in them that we had spent the last few years of our lives in tents, or in the arctic regions under huts of snow and ice. And then the ship heads in towards Malta, and instead of dropping anchor and waiting for a tender, glides calmly into what is apparently its chief thoroughfare. It is like a Venice of the sea, and you feel as though you were intruding in a gentleman's front yard. The houses and battlements and ramparts lie close on either side, so near that one could toss a biscuit into the hands of the Tommies smoking on the guns, or the natives lounging on the steps that run from the front doors into the sea itself. The yard-arms reach above the line of the house-tops, and the bowsprit seems to threaten havoc with the window-panes of the custom-house. We are not apparently entering a harbor, but steaming down the main street of a city--a city of yellow limestone, with streets, walls, houses, and waste places all of yellow limestone. We might, for all the disturbance we are making, be moving forward in a bark canoe, and not in an ocean steamer drawing twenty-five feet of water. And then when the anchor drops, dozens of little boats, yellow and green and blue, with high posts at the bow and sterns like those on gondolas, shoot out from the steps, and their owners clamor for the proud privilege of carrying us over the few feet of water which runs between the line of houses and the ship's sides. [Illustration: STREET OF SANTA LUCIA, MALTA]