nd donors to the
east, arousers of crusades and freers of the Sepulchre! You build a high
tower!"

Carters and carts going by pushed us to the edge of road and covered
all with dust. He waited until the cloud sank, then he said, "Do you
know--but you cannot know what it is to be sent from pillar to post and
wait in antechambers where the air stifles, and doff cap--who have
been captain of ships!--to chamberlain, page and lackey? To be called
dreamer, adventurer, dicer! To hear the laugh and catch the sneer! To be
the persuader, the beggar of good and bad, high and low--to beg year
in and year out, cold and warmth, summer and winter, sunrise, noon and
sunset, calm and storm, beg of galleon and beg of carrack, yea, beg of
cockboat! To see your family go needy, to be doubted by wife and child
and brethren and friends and acquaintance! To have them say, 'While you
dream we go hungry!' and 'What good will it do us if there is India,
while we famish in Spain?' and 'You love us not, or you would become a
prosperous sea captain!'--Not one year but eighteen, eighteen, since I
saw in vision the sun set not behind water but behind vale and hill and
mountain and cities rich beyond counting, and smelled the spice draught
from the land!"

I saw that he must count upon huge indemnity. We all dream indemnity.
But still I thought and think that there was here a weakness in him. Far
inward he may have known it himself, the outer self was so busy finding
grounds! After a moment he spoke again, "Little things bring little
reward. But to keep proportion and harmony, great thing must bring great
things! You do not know what it is to cross where no man hath crossed
and to find what no man hath found!"

"Yes, it is a great thing!"

"Then," said he, "what is it, that which I ask, to the grandeur of
time!"

He spoke with a lifted face, eyes upon the mountain crests and the blue
they touched. They were nearer us than they had been; the Pass of Elvira
was at hand. Yet on I walked, and before me still hung the far ocean
west of Palos. I said, "I know something of the guesses, the chances and
the dangers, but I have not spent there years of study--"

He kindled, having an auditor whom he chose to think intelligent. He
checked his horse, that fell to grazing the bit of green by the way. "As
though," he said, "I stood in Cipango beneath a golden roof, I know that
it can be done! Twelve hundred leagues at the most. Look!" he said. "You
are not