a man very happy the other day." "How could that be?" said Harte; "there was no one there but ourselves." Cave then reminded him that during dinner a plate of victuals had been sent behind a screen. They were for Johnson, he said, who was dressed so shabbily that he declined sitting down to table, but who had overheard the conversation, and was highly delighted with Harte's encomiums on his work.

The military Order of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem was founded about the year 1100, by John Briset, a Norman baron, and Muriel, his wife. The dress of the Order was originally a black upper garment, with a white cross in front.

The knights were required to take an oath of chastity; to be rigid in the performance of their devotions; to yield implicit obedience to their superiors; to defend Christians against pagans; to renounce all property independent of the common stock; and lastly, to relieve the needy and to administer to the sick. They were especially enjoined, as the champions of the cross, to fight for it to the last gasp of their lives.

To enumerate the heroic exploits performed by the Knights of St. John in the Holy Land would occupy far more space than we can devote to the subject. Even when the cause of the Crusade must have appeared almost desperate even to themselves, they continued to defend the sacred territory almost inch by inch against the immense

masses of infidels who confronted them. The same heroic gallantry which had distinguished them in the early period of their history, at the sieges of Ascalon and Gaza, shone no less conspicuous at the sieges of Azotus and St. Jean d'Acre. Of the ninety knights who defended Azotus, when that fortress was at length taken by assault, not one was found alive. The dead body of the last served as a stepping-stone to the advancing infidels. It was in the year 1310, after a long and bloody contest with the desperate piratical inhabitants of the island of Rhodes, that the Knights of St. John invested themselves with the sovereignty of that island. Here they remained-carrying on a continual warfare with the Mohammedans, and enriching themselves by commerce- till the year 1522, when the sultan, Solyman the Fourth, appeared before the island with an overwhelming armament. The details of the protracted and bloody siege which followed-in which the Turks lost one hundred thousand men are well known. The last bulwark which was blown up was that of the English knights, who on four different occasions drove back the Turks from the breach, and tore down the crescent which they had planted on the walls. The last who consented to capitulate was the grand master, the venerable L'Isle Adam. When at length the Sultan Solyman subsequently entered Rhodes as a conqueror, he paid a visit to the heroic old man, with whose mis

fortunes he is said to have deeply sympathised. "It is not without pain," he said, "that I force this Christian at his time of life to leave his dwelling." By the terms of the capitulation, the surviving knights were allowed to quit Rhodes unmolested, and to retire whithersoever they chose. Accordingly, in 1530, they took possession of the island of Malta, which had been conceded to them by the Emperor Charles the Fifth, where they continued till the extinction of their Order.

One of the most remarkable features in the history of the Knights of St. John, was the long and bitter rivalry which existed between them and the Knights Templars. So intense, indeed, was their mutual hatred, that, forgetful of the common cause which enjoined them to fight side by side against the infidel, they more than once, on the plains of Palestine, pointed their lances against one another. The last and most sanguinary of these combats took place in 1259, when the Knights of St. John obtained a complete victory over their rivals, leaving scarcely a Templar alive on the field of battle. When, about half a century afterward, the Knights Templars ceased to exist as an Order, the greater portion of their possessions was conferred by the Pope and the other European sovereigns on the Knights of St. John. Among the property thus transferred to them was the temple in Fleet Street, which in the reign of Edward the Third they leased to the students of