than that; many a heart also to brave efforts and determinations that
were doomed to come to nothing and to end only in failure. And among
others who felt the force and was swayed and lifted by the prevailing
influence, there lived, some four and a half centuries ago, a little boy
playing about the wharves of Genoa, well known to his companions as
Christoforo, son of Domenico the wool-weaver, who lived in the Vico
Dritto di Ponticello.




CHAPTER II

THE HOME IN GENOA

It is often hard to know how far back we should go in the ancestry of a
man whose life and character we are trying to reconstruct. The life that
is in him is not his own, but is mysteriously transmitted through the
life of his parents; to the common stock of his family, flesh of their
flesh, bone of their bone, character of their character, he has but added
his own personality. However far back we go in his ancestry, there is
something of him to be traced, could we but trace it; and although it
soon becomes so widely scattered that no separate fraction of it seems to
be recognisable, we know that, generations back, we may come upon some
sympathetic fact, some reservoir of the essence that was him, in which we
can find the source of many of his actions, and the clue, perhaps, to his
character.

In the case of Columbus we are spared this dilemma. The past is reticent
enough about the man himself; and about his ancestors it is almost