Morning journal and courier., 1892-03-05

you. Moslem rights were not deprived b, your expulsion from lands where you did not belong"
 But our imperial Barbary is cut intc pieces. We are no more a mighty peo pie. Our temples and our treasures ars gone!" he passionately retorted-
 ''So are your pirates and slayes;" persisted unfeelingly. fThose are tho sort of things civilization will never sgsir tolerate. It will never disturb an earn. est and zealous religion; but it will sure ly eventually extirpate any religion O, race that deprives the lowlisst of its fol lowers and people, men or women, oI equal justice"
 He would not dwell upon this implied contrast between Christianity and Mo hamm-danism, but continually bewailed the English possession of Gibraltar and Malta ss a menace to all Oriental supre macy, and the direct cause, or perrnisss ble cause. of the dismemberment and SD propriation of northern Africa by Spain, Italy and France. He admitted that its development, especially in Tunis, Tripoli and Algeria, had been marvellous within the last quarter of 8 century; that Gibral- tar and Malta in the hands of the English guaranteed permanent and peaceful trade with all Mediterranean countries by the
 
 fessed that without this very English stra- getic supremacy in the Mediterranean his own safety with his hides and wheat, in transit from Tunis to any neighboring port, would be extremely prohlematic if not altogether improbable.
 In such unusual converse with these strange folk the voyage from Palma to Malta was passed. I was often able to lead the momentGry topic from Moors to Maltese, and thus secured much valuable information concerning the real as well as the sentimental condition ot the latter. Two very interesting facts developed through the apparent extraordinary ha- tired of English rulers by the captain and Tunisisn, and their seeming equal mutual affection for the common people of Malta, the folk who were in it's peasantry even before its days of chivalry under the old en Knights of Malta, whose deeds and fame were the most luminous in sll medi- eval history.
 The first was the passionate love all Mall tese have for their sterile, naked. si- roceo-swept little hump of rock to which they cling, and nurture so lovingly that it retnrns them, conditions being considered, the most bounteous and luxuriant rewards of any equal area on the face of the earth "Flower of the Earth" they call the tree less spot. My country adored" they ever name the cassel or village where they are born. And as ''the purgatory" or penance- spot they know any other land beneath the sun to which necessity has led them.
 have noticed this same almost patheti- caliy desperate affection for one's birth spot to be true in other rugged and sterile abodes of men. Nothing could induce the half-frozen people of Labrador to quit those regions of silence and desolation The Highland crofter of Scotland is a spiritless, heart-broken man when forced from his wild straths and glens. Who that has stepped foot on the Arran Is- lands, of Galway, ever saw other such pictures of hopeless poverty and suffer ing! Yet for generations their people have clung to the rocks, like the dolorous puff fins which nest in their sides amid the At lantic's howlings, and no power has been sufficient to tear them away from their starvation and wretchedness.
 It was curious thing, 100, to learn from the Tunisian that the peasantry of Malta were more Berber and Arab races than of Greek, Italian and Spanish. By all affinities, save the one of religion, he claimed them as brethren to a man. In their customs. superstitions and many of their homeside ways, as we'll as in nearly all methods, or rather want of method, in agriculture they are, he claimed, precisely like the Berber tribe farmers in the val leys behind Tunis and Al2iers. But more striking than sll else, in proof that the Maltese were his kindred, was his claim which I have since found to be true, that while nearly all spoke a sort of English, Italian or Spanish patois, every one could at any moment cross into northern Africa and converse with the natives in a meas ursbly pure Arabic tongue.
 "We are at Malta, senor. Would you look upon sleeping Valetts from the sea in the early morningi'
 Such was the cheery call of our captain as We approached the most famous island of the Mediterranean. When l reached the deck our craft lay league distant from port, almost imperceptibly moving towards the white island snd winter city over rippieless sea, with sails scarcely filled by the faintest of breezes which merely whispered of the morning: for the sun seemed to stand tremendous globe of crimson on the seq horizon, away over there between Greece aud Crete.
 My eyes uever before beheld 90 tran scendent and radiant a scene. The whole bosom of the sea seemed enveloped in a downy mantle of pearl gold and crimson, which. lying low upon the water, showed countless ma;chless changes of color, and possessed the added marvellous effect of lifting ali discernable objects to an un- wonting altitude.
 Our brigantiae, with other craft here and there about us, appeared to ride upon an opalescent, intangible yet palpsble sur face of softly flaming cloud. Though Sic fly lay sixty miles to the north, its shore line, lifted vertically. and not in mirage, showed strangely near, with the huge cone of Etna like spear-hesd of silver above.
 But where are the words with which to paint for another's seeing the island and its ancient city of the Knights as they rose out of the pulsiug, throbbing tints of that glorious morning witcheryi If one could dream that the gods had transformed the sea into s bed of cameo rose, and, through cycles of time, with their most cunning srti6cers wrought it into miracles of fili- gree, and then chiseled upon it white re- lief of the islands area, whose wondrous design had eliminated in outlines and de- tail of massive grandeur and mstchless simplicity where the city of fortresses and palaces stood, vague hint of this morn ing scene could come with the dreaming and seeming.
 And on this morning, as we slowly glided into the eastern of the two ports, and the ideal gradually resolved into the real, the mluu, IoioWlnS tne imagery oi the cameo, it's setting, and those who wrought, loved to finger on the thought that those who had built had left their miracle of labor silent aud still, es ghost ly and stately housing for all who came. Utter silence brooded over the vast bleached battlements. Escarpments, ter races. bastions, entablatures and huge fiat roofs were lifeless and still. The ship ping was hagIess, apparently crewless, and still as though graven from onyx into the picture. Not an oar stirred the mirroring harbor. Not more still or pregnant with mystery is the Lybian Sphinx than was every strange object upon which the eye