ften as he sat in cabin or on deck, or rising paced to and fro, we who
listened to his account, listened to poet and enthusiast speaking
of earths to come. Besides books like those of Marco Polo and John
Mandeville and the Bishop of Cambrai he had studied philosophers and
the ancients and Scripture and the Fathers. He spoke unwaveringly of
prophecies, explicit and many, of his voyage, and the rounding out of
earth by him, Christopherus Columbus. More than once or twice, in
the great cabin, beneath the swinging lantern, he repeated to us
such passages, his voice making great poetry of old words. "Averroes
saith--Albertus Magnus saith--Aristotle saith--Seneca saith--Saint
Augustine saith--Esdras in his fourth book saith--" Salt air sweeping
through seemed to fall into a deep, musical beat and rhythm. "After
the council at Salamanca when great churchmen cried Irreligion and even
Heresy upon me, I searched all Scripture and drew testimony together.
In fifty, yea, in a hundred places it is plain! King David saith--job
saith--Moses saith--Thus it reads in Genesis--"

Diego de Arana smote the table with his hand. "I am yours, senor, to
find for the Lord!" Fray Ignatio lifted dark eyes. "I well believe that
nothing happens but what is chosen! I will tell you that in my cell at
La Rabida I heard a cry, 'Come over, Ignatio the Franciscan!'"

And I, listening, thought, "Not perhaps that ancient spiritual singing
of spiritual things! But in truth, yes, it is chosen. Did not the Whole
of Me that I can so dimly feel set my foot upon this ship?" And going
out on deck before I slept, I looked at the stars and thought that we
were like the infant in the womb that knows not how nor where it is
carried.

We might be four hundred leagues from Spain. Still the wind drove us,
still we hardly shifted canvas, still the sky spread clear, of a vast
blue depth, and the blue glass plain of the sea lay beneath. It was too
smooth, the wind in our rigging too changeless of tune. At last, all
would have had variety spring. There began a veritable hunger for some
change, and it was possible to feel a faint horror. _What if this is the
horror--to go on forever and ever like this_?

Then one morning when the sun rose, it lit a novel thing. Seaweed or
grass or herbage of some sort was afloat about us. Far as the eye might
reach it was like a drowned meadow, vari-colored, awash. All that day we
watched it. It came toward us from the west; we ran through