ersons who lived permanently within
its walls should be free from arrest for debt during a certain period.
If any of its citizens committed an offense outside of its walls, giving
cause for civil complaint, the case must be tried only in the local
tribunals of Citta Vecchia. These and many other special enactments,
though designed to particularly favor the residents of the old capital,
failed to have the desired effect. The people gradually removed to the
more attractive seaport, fascinated by its scenes of busy life, its
freshness and cleanliness, together with its charming site, all were in
such broad contrast to the drowsy, cheerless inland resort which crowns
the Bingemma Hills.

There is plenty of evidence hereabout to show that this was of old the
great centre of life upon the island of Malta, and that more than one
race was here in large and thriving numbers, each of whom ruled for a
period of longer or shorter duration, and then passed away. Conjecture
alone can fill up the gap between the known and the unknown, traceable
by crumbling monuments and suggestive ruins.

Not far from Citta Vecchia, clearly attesting to the great antiquity of
this mid-island neighborhood as a populous centre, the hills--Bingemma
Mountains, the Maltese call them--are thickly occupied by Phoenician
tombs excavated in the solid rock, "pathetic monuments of banished men."
Out of these tombs curious articles have often been taken, and such are
still occasionally found in them. It is plain that the primitive people
who formed these rock-tombs possessed good tools and an aptitude for
using them; also that they had a cultured taste in architecture,
adhering to a certain purity of order in their designs wherever
exhibited, whether in tomb or temple. The resemblance of these caves at
Bingemma to the sepulchral grottoes which still exist in the environs of
Tyre and Sidon is remarkable. The latter, it will be remembered, was the
early seat of the Phoenician kingdom, in which fact we have evidence
of a common parentage between the two people who built them.

Strangers are offered apocryphal coins by itinerant peddlers, which
purport to have been current in Malta when ancient tribes were masters
of the group; but common sense teaches us that original and genuine
articles in this line must have been exhausted centuries ago. There are
also urns and domestic pottery on sale at Citta Vecchia, supposed to
have been in use among the Phoenicians. The s