he sailor Juan Lepe to the physician Juan Lepe, becoming "Doctor" and
"Senor." The wheel turns and a man's past makes his present.

A few days from Gomera, an hour after sunset, the night was torn by the
hugest, flaming, falling star that any of us had ever seen. The mass
drove down the lower skirt of the sky, leaving behind it a wake of fire.
It plunged into the sea. There is no sailor but knows shooting stars.
But this was a hugely great one, and Ocean-Sea very lonely, and to most
there our errand a spectral and frightening one. It needed both the
Admiral and Fray Ignatio to quell the panic.

The next day a great bird like a crane passed over the _Santa Maria_. It
came from Africa, behind us. But it spoke of land, and the sailors gazed
wistfully.

This day I entered the great cabin when none was there but the Admiral,
and again he sat at table with his charts and his books. He asked of the
sick and I answered. Again he sat looking through open door and window
at blue water, a great figure of a man with a great head and face and
early-silvered hair. "Do you know aught," he asked, "of astrology?"

I answered that I knew a little of the surface of it.

"I have a sense," he said, "that our stars are akin, yours and mine. I
felt it the day Granada fell, and I felt it on Cordova road, and again
that day below La Rabida when we turned the corner and the bells rang
and you stood beside the vineyard wall. Should I not have learned in
more than fifty years to know a man? The stars are akin that will endure
for vision's sake."

I said, "I believe that, my Admiral."

He sat in silence for a moment, then drew the log between us and turned
several pages so that I might see the reckoning. "We have come well," I
said. "Yet with so fair a wind, I should have thought--"

He turned the leaves till he rested at one covered with other figures.
"Here it is as it truly is, and where we truly are! We have oversailed
all that the first show, and so many leagues besides."

"Two records, true and untrue! Why do you do it so?"

"I have told them that after seven hundred leagues we should find land.
Add fifty more for our general imperfection. But it may be wider than
I think. We may not come even to some fringing island in eight hundred
leagues, no, nor in more than that! If it be a thousand, if it be two
thousand, on I go! But after the seven hundred is passed, it will be
hard to keep them in hand. So, though we are covering more, I l