ral spread life
throughout the squadron. Nobody slept that night. It was only
twenty-four hours since they were ready to throw him overboard; but they
now believed in him and bitterly accused one another.

THE TRACK OF COLUMBUS.

From a paper in _New England Magazine_, 1892, taken originally from
a volume of "Reminiscences" left by HORATIO J. PERRY, who made a
voyage from Spain to New Orleans in 1847.

A fortnight out at sea! We are upon the track of Christopher Columbus.
Only three centuries and a half ago the keels of his caravels plowed for
the first time these very waters, bearing the greatest heart and wisest
head of his time, and one of the grandest figures in all history.

To conceive Columbus at his true value requires some effort in our age,
when the earth has been girdled and measured, when the sun has been
weighed and the planets brought into the relation of neighbors over the
way, into whose windows we are constantly peeping in spite of the social
gulf which keeps us from visiting either Mars or Venus. It is not easy
to put ourselves back into the fifteenth century and limit ourselves as
those men were limited.

I found it an aid to my comprehension of Columbus, this chance which
sent me sailing over the very route of his great voyage. It is not, even
now, a frequented route. The bold Spanish and Portuguese navigators of
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are no longer found upon it. The
trade of the Indies has passed into other hands, and this is not the
road from England to the West Indies or to America.

Thus you may still sail for weeks in these seas without ever meeting a
ship. Leaving Madeira or the Canaries, you may even reach those western
lands he reached without having seen or felt any other sign or incident
except precisely such as were noted by him.

DEATH WAS COLUMBUS' FRIEND.

OSKAR FERDINAND PESCHEL, a noted German geographer. Born at
Dresden, March 17, 1826; died, August 31, 1875.

Death saved Columbus the infliction of a blow which he probably would
have felt more than Bobadilla's fetters. He was allowed to carry to the
grave the glorious illusion that Cuba was a province of the Chinese
Empire, that Hispaniola was the Island Zipangu, and that only a narrow
strip of land, instead of a hemisphere covered by water, intervened
between the Caribbean Sea and the Bay of Bengal.

The discoverer of America died without suspecting that he had found a
new con