Where we stand upon its tessellated floor, each square yard is sacred to the memory of some departed Knight; the marbles bearing their names are also emblazoned with their arms. One can readily imagine the many festive occasions, elaborate and pompous ceremonials, military, civic, and religious, which have taken place within these walls while the Knights were at the acme of their power. The chairs of state were then filled with gaudily dressed officials. Priests, in glittering robes, bearing gold and silver mitres, filed hither and thither in long processions, accompanied by banners, and preceded by youths in spotless white, who swung burning and pungent incense in silver vases, while the ponderous organ breathed forth its solemn, reverberatory notes. The tapestried alcoves were brilliant with numberless candles, and the high altar was ablaze with burning wax, while the figures in the sacred paintings must have looked down from their canvases with weird and cynical expression. No doubt these church ceremonials were solemn and impressive, where one and all assumed a virtue, if they had it not. Is it surprising that this cunningly devised and gaudy display, these elaborate performances, should be awe-inspiring to an ignorant and superstitious people? One can even conceive that the actors themselves, in such a theatrical show, having been brought up in the Roman Catholic faith, may believe that they, poor, finite creatures, individually glorify the great and good God by this hollow mummery. To-day, only a score of nun-like Maltese women, clad in black, kneel here and there before some favorite saint. If the stranger catches a glance of their dark eyes from behind the screening faldetta, he finds them more redolent of earth than of heaven,--dreamy, persuading eyes, glancing from beneath downcast lids, and shaded by long lashes. Only two male visitors are present,--the author and his guide, while a single priest, robed in a velvet surplice, goes through a pantomime of kneeling and crossing himself in front of the high altar, with his back toward the scanty audience. This man's voice is so low, if he speaks at all, that the solemn silence of the place is quite unbroken. If he could be heard, no worshiper of the class who come hither would understand the Latin tongue in which he is supposed to read the service.