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Esteban turned a sick, white face over his shoulder and jerked out his orders; then he kicked his tired mount into a swifter gallop. It was he who first broke out into the clearing. One glance, and the story was told. The hut was but a crumbling skeleton of charred poles.

Valetta, or la Valette, in honor of one of the most famous of the Grand Masters, the modern capital of Malta, is a fairly large place, though by no means extensive enough to be styled a City, except out of courtesy. How dingy the buildings and how dusty the pavements from the crumbling masonry.

All was peaceful enough now. The forts were crumbling, the barracks empty, and the 'neat cottages, smiling flower gardens, smooth grass- plats and gravel-walks, which were once the pride of the citadel, replaced for the most part with Guava-scrub and sensitive plants. But nothing can destroy the beauty of the panorama.

Here and there crumbling ruins arose above the plain some ancient, others medieval, none modern. Before them, in the distance, arose the Apennines, among which were, here and there, visible the white outlines of some villa or hamlet. For mile after mile they drove on; and the drive soon proved very monotonous.

"All the landmarks by which Feversham was to know the house in which the letters were hidden had gone. The roofs had been torn off, the houses dismantled, the front walls carried away. Narrow alleys of crumbling fives-courts that was how Feversham described the place crossing this way and that and gaping to the stars.

And straightway Alice began to point out familiar monuments, the spire of the Sainte Chapelle, the square of the Louvre, the gilded dome of Napoleon's tomb, the crumbling Tour Saint Jacques, disfigured now with scaffolding for repairs, and the Sacré Cour, shining resplendent on the Montmartre hill. To all of which the lady listened indifferently.

They watched new worlds collecting out of chaos, they saw them speed upon their high aerial course till, grown hoary, their foundation-rocks crumbling with age, they wasted away into the vastness whence they had gathered, to be replaced by fresh creations that in their turn took form, teemed with life, waxed, waned, and vanished.

Then, as if there was still something so dangerous about him, that only by a great number of hands could he be hoped to be secured, the infuriated peasantry gathered in a dense circle around what they considered his temporary place of refuge, and as the sun, which had now climbed above the tree tops, and dispersed, in a great measure, many of the heavy clouds of morning, shone down upon the excited group, they might have been supposed there assembled to perform some superstitious rite, which time had hallowed as an association of the crumbling ruin around which they stood.

On the steps of a dark crumbling out-house, probably the bath-house, sat a stalwart lad with a guitar, singing with some spirit the well-known ballad: 'I'm leaving this enchanting spot To go into the desert. The fat man came into the room. 'They're bringing you in your tea, he told me, with an affable smile.

Half-way down the slope they came to one of the unspeakably mournful little burying-grounds wherein the mountain people rest after their narrow lives. It was unhedged, uncared for, and a few crumbling boards for headstones told the living generation where the dead were at rest. For a moment they paused to look at a spot under a great beech where the earth had been lately disturbed.