There was at the Centennial Exposition the head of a woman cut in butter, which attracted much attention from the rural visitors. For this they passed by the women painted on canvas or carved in marble, they were too like the real thing, and the countrymen probably knew how difficult it is to make butter into moulds. For some reason Malta reminds you of this butter lady. It is a real city--with real houses and cathedral and streets, no doubt, but you have a feeling that they are not genuine, and that though it is very cleverly done, it is, after all, a city carved out of cheese or butter. Some of the cheese is mouldy and covered with green, and some of the walls have holes in them, as has aerated bread or _Schweitzerkase_, and the streets and the pavements, and the carved facades of the churches and opera-house, and the earth and the hills beyond--everything upon which your eye can rest is glaring and yellow, with not a red roof to relieve it; it is all just yellow limestone, and it looks like Dutch cheese. It is like no other place exactly that you have ever seen. The approach into the canal-like harbor under the guns and the search-lights of the fortifications, the moats and drawbridges, and the glaring monotony of the place itself, which seems to have been cut out of one piece and painted with one brush, suggest those little toy fortresses of yellow wood which appear in the shop windows at Christmas-time. Of course the first and last thought one has of Malta is that the island was the home of the Order of the Knights of St. John, or Knights Hospitallers. This order, which was the most noble of those of the days of mediaeval chivalry, was composed of that band of warrior monks who waged war against the infidels, who kept certain vows, and who, under the banner of the white cross, became honored and feared throughout the then known world. Their headquarters changed from place to place during the four hundred years that stretched from the eleventh century, when the order was first established, up to 1530, when Charles V. made over Malta and all its dependencies in perpetual sovereignty to the keeping of these Knights. They had no sooner fortified the island than there began the nine months' siege of the Turks, one of the most memorable sieges in history. When it was ended, the Turks re-embarked ten thousand of the forty thousand men they had landed, and of the nine thousand Knights present under the Grand Master Jean de la Valette when the siege had opened, but six hundred capable of bearing arms remained alive.