had laid a new world, with all its inestimable treasures and millions
of benighted inhabitants, at the feet of the Catholic princes.

Columbus had just returned from his first voyage. He had been scorned
as an adventurer by the courtiers of Lisbon, mocked as a visionary by
the learned priests of the Council in Salamanca, who, with texts from
the Scriptures and quotations from the saints, had tried to convince
him that the world was flat; he had been pointed at by the rabble in
the streets as a madman who maintained that there was a land where the
people walked with their heads down; and, after months of trial, he
had been able to equip his three small craft and collect a crew of
ninety men only by the aid of a royal schedule offering exemption from
punishment for offenses against the laws to all who should join the
expedition.

At last he had sailed amid the murmurs of an incredulous crowd, who
thought him and his companions doomed to certain destruction, and now
he had returned[1] bringing with him the living proofs of what he had
declared to exist beyond that mysterious ocean, and showed to the
astounded people samples of the unknown plants and animals, and of
_the gold_ which he had said would be found there in fabulous
quantities.

It was the proudest moment of the daring navigator's life when, clad
in his purple robe of office, bedecked with the insignia of his rank,
he entered the throne-room of the palace in Barcelona and received
permission to be seated in the royal presence to relate his
experiences. Around the hall stood the grandees of Spain and the
magnates of the Church, as obsequious and attentive to him now as they
had been proud and disdainful when, a hungry wanderer, he had knocked