From my lofty roof-top here, in the highest part of Valetta, it is possible to take in at one glance a that can hardly be surpassed for beauty and interest.  
Intensely blue, the sea around the rock bases of this wonderful little island as if it loved them. There are no rude breakers, no thundering, earth-shaking on-rushings of snowy- waves, leaping at the point of impact into filmy columns of spray.
 
Overhead the violet, star-sprinkled splendours of the night are just beginning to with returning light. One cannot say that the beams are definite, rather it is a palpitating glow that is just commencing to the whole solemnity of the above, as does the first impulse of returning joy relax the lines of a saddened face. Far to the north may be seen a tiny cluster of fleecy cloudlets nestling together as if timid and lonely in that vast expanse of clear sky. But as the coming day touches them they put on garments of glory and beauty. Infinite gradations of colour, all tender, melt into one another upon their billowy surfaces until they spread and brighten, investing all their quadrant of the heavens with the of the Gardens of Paradise.
 
 
 
At my feet lie the of stone that have, by the patient unending labour of this busy people, grown up through past ages, until now the mind reels in the attempt to sum up the account of that labour. A sea of white roofs, here and there with the dome and twin steeples of a church, the only breaks in the universal fashion of roof architecture. Away beneath, the white, clean streets—so strangely silent that the far-off of a goat-bell on the neck of some incoming band of milk-bearers strikes sharply athwart the atmosphere, like the fall of a piece of broken glass on to the pavement below. A few dim figures, recumbent upon the wide of the Opera House, stir uneasily as the new light reaches them, and , and stretch, and for cigarettes. A hurried, furtive-looking labourer past, his bare feet arousing no echo, but making him pass like a ghost. And then, from the direction of the Auberge de Castile, comes a solemn sound of music.
 
Its first faint strains rise upon the sweet morning calm like some lovely suggestion of prayer, but they are accompanied by an indefinite as of a beating at the walls of one’s heart. More and more distinct the strains arise until recognizable as Chopin’s “Marche Funèbre,” and suddenly in the distance may be discerned, turning into the Strada Mezzodi, row after row of khaki-clad figures moving, oh, so slowly. Deadened and dull the drum-beats fall, more and more that heart-rending music, and close in its rear appears the only spot of colour in the331 sad ranks, the brilliant folds of the union , hiding that small oblong coffer which holds all that was mortal of Private No. ——. Perhaps in life he was rather an unit of his , at times a troublesome one, familiar with “pack-drill,” “C.B.,” and “clink,” but now he has been brevetted, for a hour his fast-decaying are greeted with almost Royal honours.
 
Nearer and nearer creeps the solemn and stately procession, so slowly that the strain becomes intolerable. How do his comrades bear it? We who knew him not at all find ourselves choking, in sympathy. While that silent escort is filing past we have traced his history, as it might be, his babyhood in some fair British village far away, his school-days, his , his mother’s pride. Then his , what he would do when he was a man. Or perhaps he came from the slums of a great town, where, neglected, unwanted, he wallowed in the , living like the sparrows, but less easily, and only surviving the rough treatment by of a harder grip of life than so many of his fellows. He knew no love, was coarse of speech, given to much drink and little . But who thinks of that now? He is our dear brother departed, and his comrades follow him home, for the time at least solemnized at the presence among them of that awful power before whom all heads must bow.
 
Now, the so lately street has filled. Swarthy Maltese, Sicilian............