it from the
east. Now it thinned away; now it thickened until it seemed that the
sea was strewn with rushes like a castle floor. With oars we caught and
brought into ship wreaths of it. All night we sailed in this strange
plain. A yellow dawn showed it still on either side the _Santa Maria_,
and thicker, with fewer blue sea straits and passes than on yesterday.
The Pinta and the Nina stood out with a strange, enchanted look, as
ships crossing a plain more vast than the plain of Andalusia. Still that
floating weed thickened. The crowned woman at our prow pushed swathes of
it to either side. Our mariners hung over rail, talking, talking. "What
is it--and where will it end? Mayhap presently we can not plough it!"

I was again and again to admire how for forty years he had stored
sea-knowledge. It was not only what those gray eyes had seen, or those
rather large, well molded ears had heard, or that powerful and nervous
hand had touched. But he knew how to take, right and left, knowledge
that others gathered, as he knew that others took and would take what
he gathered. He knew that knowledge flows. Now he stood and told that no
less a man than Aristotle had recorded such a happening as this. Certain
ships of Gades--that is our Cadiz--driven by a great wind far into
River-Ocean, met these weeds or others like them, distant parents of
these. They were like floating islands forever changing shape, and those
old ships sailed among them for a while. They thought they must have
broken from sea floor and risen to surface, and currents brought other
masses from land. Tunny fish were caught among them.

And that very moment, as the endless possibilities of things would have
it, one, leaning on the rail, cried out that there were tunnies. We all
looked and saw them in a clear canal between two floating masses. It
brought the Admiral credence. "Look you all!" he said, "how most things
have been seen before!"

"But Father Aristotle's ship--Was he 'Saint' or 'Father'?"

"He was a heathen--he believed in Mahound."

"No, he lived before Mahound. He was a wise man--"

"But his ships turned back to Cadiz. They were afraid of this
stuff--that's the point!"

"They turned back," said the Admiral. "And the splendor and the gold
were kept for us."

A thicker carpet of the stuff brushed ship side. One of the boys cried,
"Ho, there is a crab!" It sat indeed on a criss-cross of broken reeds,
and it seemed to stare at us solemnly. "Do not a