BY J. O. DAVIDSON.
Chapter IX.
ASHORE AT MALTA.
Sailors have a proverb that Valetta Harbor is like a hen-coop—"no gittin' out when you're in, and no gittin' in when you're out." So thought Frank, as the steamer glided into a narrow channel between the two enormous forts of the outer harbor, through the embrasures of which scores of heavy cannon, high up over the mast-heads of the Arizona, looked grimly down. Other forts, almost equally huge and formidable, guarded the entrance to the inner harbor, which was so narrow that the three English iron-clads anchored within almost blocked it up, and it was a puzzling question how the Arizona was to pass them.
"We're bound to have a smash now," muttered Herrick, "unless that lubber of a pilot's kind 'nuff to fall overboard."
The poor Maltese speedily justified this bitter verdict. Two of the vessels were passed safely, but as they neared the third the pilot got flurried, and gave a wrong order. The next moment the Arizona came smash into the counter of the iron-clad, sweeping away the miniature flower garden which her captain had arranged along the stern gallery, overturning several guns, and, as Jack Dewey poetically phrased it, "playin' thunder and pitchforks generally."
MALTA.
1. The Grand Harbor.
2. Agozo (Maltese) Boat.
3. Landing-Place.
4. The Collision.
5. Street in Malta.
Instantly the English boatswain's shrill pipe was heard, and a crowd of sturdy fellows in clean "whites" and bare feet came racing aft, and cleared away the wreck in a twinkling, not without a few rough-hewn jokes at "Yankee seamanship," which the Arizona's men repaid with interest.
"Just as well you've got no navy, if that's how you handle a ship," shouted one of the English.