and
the Islands. There would be returnings to Genoa, and glad welcomings by
the little household in the narrow street; in 1472 and 1473 he was with
his father at Savona, helping with the wool-weaving and tavern-keeping;
possibly also there were interviews with Benincasa, who was at that time
living in Genoa, and making his famous sea-charts. Perhaps it was in his
studio that Christopher first saw a chart, and first fell in love with
the magic that can transfer the shapes of oceans and continents to a
piece of paper. Then he would be off again in another ship, to the
Golden Horn perhaps, or the Black Sea, for the Genoese had a great
Crimean trade. This is all conjecture, but very reasonable conjecture;
what we know for a fact is that he saw the white gum drawn from the
lentiscus shrubs in Chio at the time of their flowering; that fragrant
memory is preserved long afterwards in his own writings, evoked by some
incident in the newly-discovered islands of the West. There are vague
rumours and stories of his having been engaged in various expeditions
--among them one fitted out in Genoa by John of Anjou to recover the
kingdom of Naples for King Rene of Provence; but there is no reason to
believe these rumours: good reason to disbelieve them, rather.

The lives that the sea absorbs are passed in a great variety of adventure
and experience, but so far as the world is concerned they are passed in a
profound obscurity; and we need not wonder that of all the mariners who
used those seas, and passed up and down, and held their course by the
stars, and reefed their sails before the sudden squalls that came down
from the mountains, and shook them out again in the calm sunshine that
followed, there is no record of the one among their number who was
afterwards to reef and steer and hold his course to such mighty purpose.
For this period, then, we must leave him to the sea, and to the vast
anonymity of sea life.

CHAPTER IV

DOMENICO

Christopher is gone, vanished over that blue horizon; and the tale of
life in Genoa goes on without him very much as before, except that
Domenico has one apprentice less, and, a matter becoming of some
importance in the narrow condition of his finances, one boy less to feed
and clothe. For good Domenico, alas! is no economist. Those hardy
adventures of his in the buying and selling line do not prosper him; the
tavern does not pay; perhaps the tavern-keeper is too hospitable; at any
rate,