rob him of his share of profits in the colonies. The great Queen
Isabella had passed away on November 26, 1504, in the lonely castle at
Medina del Campo. In these two lives, though they had walked such
different paths, there was much resemblance. The queen, like Columbus,
had known a life of unceasing hard work and anxiety; like Columbus she
had striven for a great purpose and had triumphed; her purpose being the
driving out of the Moor, and the establishment of Spain as a world
power; like Columbus, she had made mistakes, and like Columbus, she had
known much sorrow. There was a strong bond of sympathy between these
two, and the news of the queen's death was a great blow to the bedridden
old man in Sevilla.

Isabella had asked to be buried in Granada, the city she had labored so
hard to win for Christianity, and from the day the little funeral party
set out from Medina to the day they arrived at Granada, three weeks
later, a frightful tempest raged that swept away bridges, flooded
rivers, and made roads impassable. All the time poor Columbus, as he lay
ill in the monastery, listened to the storm and thought of that mournful
party tramping with their solemn burden down to the city where he and
Isabella had both gained a victory. Maybe he envied the worker who had
passed away first, for he sadly wrote to his son Diego, "Our tired lady
now lies beyond the desires of this rough and wearisome world."

But Columbus himself was not yet out of this "wearisome world," and was
troubling his weary brain far too much about its petty details. From his
fourth voyage he had returned much poorer than he ever expected to be at
the end of his sea-going life. The little money he had been able to
collect from his plantation in Espanola had been used to equip the ships
that brought him home, and to pay his sailors; for this was a point on
which he was always most scrupulous. When his ready money was thus used