MALTA AND SICILY. 
105 
established in a small country-house, the 
property of a merchant in Valetta, to whom our 
letters of credit were addressed. This change 
will be very pleasant to us, for we are heartily 
weary of a town life. And in Valetta we 
are in a very confined, and nearly insulated 
situation, surrounded on three sides by water, 
and on the fourth hemmed in by prodigiously 
strong fortifications, which appear to a stran¬ 
ger an interminable labyrinth of ditches and 
embankments, flights of steps, and zigzag 
paths. When I pass through these wonder¬ 
ful defensive works, I regret my almost total 
ignorance of the noble art of fortification, a 
knowledge of which would prove that what 
now appears a mass of confusion and irre¬ 
gularity, is really a beautiful work of order 
and design, the result of fixed scientific prin¬ 
ciples. 
