It was raining when we got back to Valetta, and our faithful guide hurried us toward the boat-landing by a short way, for we were anxious to get home now. Every few yards we were assailed by hackmen and beggars, and by boatmen as soon as we reached the pier. He kept us intact, however, and got us into our own boat, received the rest of his fortune--enough to set him up for life, by Maltese standards--waved us good-bye, and we were being navigated across the wide, rainy waste toward our steamer, which seemed to fill one side of that little harbor. What a joy to be on deck again and in the cosey cabin, drinking hot tea and talking over our adventures and purchases with our fellow-wanderers. The ship is home, rest, comfort--a world apart. We are weighing anchor now, and working our course out of the bottle-neck, to sea. It is a narrow opening--a native pilot directs us through it and leaves the ship only at the gateway. Then we sail through and out into the darkening sky where a storm is gathering--the green billows catching the dusk purple on their tips, the gulls white as they breast the rising wind. We gather on the after deck to say good-bye to Malta. Wall upon wall, terrace upon terrace it rises from the sea--heaped and piled back against the hills--as old, as quaint, as unchanged as it was a thousand years ago. Viewed in this spectral half-light it might be any one of the ancient cities. Ephesus, Antioch, Tyre--it suggests all those names, and we speak of these things in low voices, awed by the spectacle of gathering night and storm. Then, as the picture fades, we return to the lighted cabins, where it is gay and cheerful and modern, while there in the dark behind, that old curious island life still goes on; those curious shut-in people are gathering in their houses; the day, with its cares, its worries, and its hopes is closing in on that tiny speck, set in that dark and lonely sea. FOOTNOTES: [2] There would seem to have been some sort of confusion of Malta with the city of Muscat. Perhaps the reader can figure out just what it was. It had something to do with domestic pets, I believe. XIV A SUNDAY AT SEA We are in classic waters now. All this bleak Sunday we have been steaming over the Ionian Sea, crossed so long ago by Ulysses when he went exploring; crossed and recrossed a hundred times by the galleyed fleets of Rome. We have followed the exact course, perhaps, of those old triremes with their piled-up banks of oars, when they sailed away to conquer the East, also when they returned loaded down with captives and piled high with treasure. A little while ago Cythera was on our port bow, the island where Aphrodite was born of wind and wave, and presently set out to make trouble among the human family. She and her son Cupid, who has always been too busy to grow up, have a good deal to answer for, and they are still at their mischief, and will be, no doubt, so long as men are brave and women fair.