slems and eight thousand Christians
perished--an average of some three hundred and thirty-six persons per day.
In that blazing torrid heat the sufferings of those who survived from day
to day must have been accentuated beyond bearing by the myriads of unburied
corpses by which they lived surrounded; and that the contending forces were
not swept away by pestilence is an extraordinary marvel.

[Illustration: CARRACK IN WHICH THE KNIGHTS ARRIVED AT MALTA, 1530.]

In many, nay, in most campaigns, personal feeling enters but little into
the contest. Nationality strikes against nationality, army against army, or
navy against navy; but no burning hatred of his adversary animates the
breast of the combatant on either side; it may even be said that frequently
some pity for the vanquished is felt, when all is over, by the side which
has conquered. At Malta the element of actual personal individual hatred
was the mainspring by which the combatants on both sides were moved; each
regarded the other as an infidel, the slaying of whom was the sacrifice
most acceptable to the God they worshipped. "Infidel" was the term which
each hurled at the other; to destroy the infidel, root and branch, was the
act imposed upon those whose faith was the one only passport to a blessed
eternity, and those who fell in the strife, whether Christian or Moslem,
felt assured that for them the gates of heaven stood wide open. Great as
were those others who perished, faithful to the death as were those noble
knights who died to a man in the culminating agony of St. Elmo, adroit,
resourceful, master of himself and others as was the famous Dragut, there
is one name and one alone that shines like a beacon light upon a hill-top
when we think of the siege of Malta. Jean Parisot de la Valette, whose name
is enshrined for ever in that noble city which crowns Mount Sceberass at
the present day, was the forty-eighth Grand Master of the Noble Order of
the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem the charter for which, contained in
the original Bull of Pope Paschal II., dated 1113 (in which the Holy Father
took the Order under his special protection), may be seen to this day in
the armoury of the palace at Valetta. At the time when the supreme honour
was conferred upon him, in the year 1557, he had passed through every grade
of the Order: as soldier, captain, general, Counsellor, Grand Cross: in all
of them displaying a valour, a piety, a self-abnegation beyond all praise,
A