some people the only familiar incident in Columbian biography, is
attributed. The story is that at a banquet given by the Cardinal-Arch
bishop the conversation ran, as it always did in those days when he was
present, on the subject of the Admiral's discoveries; and that one of the
guests remarked that it was all very well for Columbus to have done what
he did, but that in a country like Spain, where there were so many men
learned in science and cosmography, and many able mariners besides, some
one else would certainly have been found who would have done the same
thing. Whereupon Columbus, calling for an egg, laid a wager that none of
the company but him self could make it stand on its end without support.
The egg was brought and passed round, and every one tried to make it
stand on end, but without success. When it came to Columbus he cracked
the shell at one end, making a flat surface on which the egg stood
upright; thus demonstrating that a thing might be wonderful, not because
it was difficult or impossible, but merely because no one had ever
thought of doing it before. A sufficiently inane story, and by no means
certainly true; but there is enough character in this little feat,
ponderous, deliberate, pompous, ostentatious, and at bottom a trick and
deceitful quibble, to make it accord with the grandiloquent public manner
of Columbus, and to make it easily believable of one who chose to show
himself in his speech and writings so much more meanly and pretentiously
than he showed himself in the true acts and business of his life.


But pomp and parade were not the only occupation of these Barcelona days.
There were long consultations with Ferdinand and Isabella about the
colonisation of the new lands; there were intrigues, and parrying of
intrigues, between the Spanish and Portuguese Courts on the subject of
the discoveries and of the representative rights of the two nations to be
the religious saviours of the New World. The Pope, to whose hands the