We know of no parallel case in warfare. Indeed, there are few more heroic pages in history than those which record the gallant defense of the Maltese fort of St. Elmo, before which, not only hundreds, but many thousands of frenzied Turks, the flower of the Ottoman army, were slaughtered in vain but savage assaults upon its walls. The few chivalrous Knights who constituted the forlorn hope left to the last in the fort sold their lives to the enemy at such fearful cost, killing so many of them outright,--quarter being neither asked nor given,--as to spread consternation among the whole army of besiegers, the remnant of whom not long after withdrew from the island in despair. The frenzied recklessness of the Turks was no match for the cool, determined purpose of men who had consecrated themselves, as it were, to death. The leader of the infidel forces, Mustafa Pasha, when surveying the scene of the last terrible conflict, and realizing that more than half of his invading army had been sacrificed before the walls of St. Elmo, is reported as having said, while looking toward the other and greater forts still held by the Knights, "If the child has required the spilling of such rivers of blood and such myriads of lives to conquer it, what sacrifice will not the parent demand before yielding?" Nothing but Mohammedan frenzy, a wild, unthinking, religious zeal, infatuation pure and simple, could have sustained this long, destructive, and fruitless siege on the part of the Turks. St. Elmo to-day is considered to be the most perfect and the most absolutely impregnable of all the fortified points of the Maltese capital. It requires two regiments of artillery and one of infantry to man the extensive walls of this fort in war time. It was, comparatively speaking, an infant in arms, in those early days. Now it is like a full-grown giant,--a man-of-war in size and strength. Its original form was almost exactly like a star, but ample additions have somewhat changed its outlines.