tch and commanded all beside to sleep. To-morrow
might be work and wakefulness enough! The ship grew silent. With the
_Pinta_ and the Nina it lay under the moon, and all around was silver
water.

He did not sleep this night, I am sure. At all times he was a provident
and wakeful sea king who knew his ship through and through. His habit
was light sleep and not many hours of that. He studied his books at
night while others slept. Lying in his bed, with eyes open or eyes shut,
he watched form in the darkness lands across sea.

This night so far from Europe passed. The sense of day at hand wrapped
us. In the east arose a cool, a stern and indifferent pallor. It
changed, it flushed. We carried in the _Santa Maria_ a cock and hens.
Cock crew.

Christopherus Columbus had Italian love for fit, harmonious noting of
vast events. This morning the trumpeter also of the Santa Maria waked
those who slept. The clear and joyful notes were heard by the Pinta and
the Pinta, too, answered with music. The Nina took it from her. Beltran
the cook and his helpers gave us a stately breakfast. The Admiral came
forth from his cabin in a dress that a prince might have worn, crimson
and tawny, and around his throat a golden chain. Far and near rushed
into light, for in these lands and seas the dawn makes no tarrying. It
is almost night, then with a great clap of light it is day.

We had voyaged, all thought, to Asia over an untrodden way. Every eye
turned to land. Not haze, not dissolving cloud, not a magic nothing in
the thought, but land, land, solid, palpable, like Palos strand! Had we
seen a great port city, had we seen ships crowding harbor, had we seen
a citadel on some height, armed and frowning, had we marked temples and
palaces and banners afloat in this divine cool wind of morning, many
aboard us would have had now no surprise, would have cried, "Of course,
I really knew it, though for the fun of it I pretended otherwise!"

But others among us could not expect such as this after the quiet night;
no light before us save that one so soon quenched, no stir of boat
at all or large or small; an unearthly quiet, a low land still as a
sleeping marsh under moon.

The light brightened. The water about us turned a blue that none there
had ever seen, so turquoise, so cerulean, so penetrable by the eye!
Before us gentle surf broke on a beach bone-white. The beach with little
rise met woodland; thick it seemed and of a vivid greenness and fairl