waters--these were to be his portion and true home hereafter.
Attendances at Court, conferences with learned monks and bishops,
sojourns on lonely islands, love under stars in the gay, sun-smitten
Spanish towns, governings and parleyings in distant, undreamed-of lands
--these were to be but incidents in his true life, which was to be
fulfilled in the solitude of sea watches.

When he left his home on this first voyage, he took with him one other
thing besides the restless longing to escape beyond the line of sea and
sky. Let us mark well this possession of his, for it was his companion
and guiding-star throughout a long and difficult life, his chart and
compass, astrolabe and anchor, in one. Religion has in our days fallen
into decay among men of intellect and achievement. The world has thrown
it, like a worn garment or an old skin, from off its body, the thing
itself being no longer real and alive, and in harmony with the life of
an age that struggles towards a different kind of truth. It is hard,
therefore, for us to understand exactly how the religion of Columbus
entered so deeply into his life and brooded so widely over his thoughts.

Hardest of all is it for people whose only experience of religion is of
Puritan inheritance to comprehend how, in the fifteenth century, the
strong intellect was strengthened, and the stout heart fortified, by the
thought of hosts of saints and angels hovering above a man's incomings
and outgoings to guide and protect him. Yet in an age that really had
the gift of faith, in which religion was real and vital, and part of the
business of every man's daily life; in which it stood honoured in the
world, loaded with riches, crowned with learning, wielding government
both temporal and spiritual, it was a very brave panoply for the soul of
man. The little boy in Genoa, with the fair hair and blue eyes and grave
freckled face that made him remarkable among his dark companions, had no