LE WITH HIS SAILORS.]

The life of Columbus has been written by hundreds of men, both in this
country and abroad, but the foregoing facts are distilled from this
great biographical mass by skilful hands, and, like the succeeding
pages, will stand for centuries unshaken by the bombardment of the
critic, while succeeding years shall try them with frost and thaw, and
the tide of time dash high against their massive front, only to recede,
quelled and defeated.[1]

[Footnote 1: The author acknowledges especially the courtesy of San
Diego Colon Columbus, a son of the great navigator, whose book
"Historiadores Primitivos" was so generously loaned the author by
relatives of young Columbus.

I have refrained from announcing in the foregoing chapter the death of
Columbus, which occurred May 20, 1506, at Valladolid, the funeral taking
place from his late residence, because I dislike to give needless pain.

B. N.]

[Illustration:]

CHAPTER II.

OTHER DISCOVERIES--WET AND DRY.

America had many other discoverers besides Columbus, but he seems to
have made more satisfactory arrangements with the historians than any of
the others. He had genius, and was also a married man. He was a good
after-dinner speaker, and was first to use the egg trick, which so many
after-dinner speakers have since wished they had thought of before Chris
did.

In falsifying the log-book in order to make his sailors believe that
they had not sailed so far as they had, Columbus did a wrong act,
unworthy of his high notions regarding the pious discovery of this land.
The artist has shown here not only one of the most faithful portraits of
Columbus and his crooked log-book, but the punishment which he should
have received.

The man on the left is Columbus; History is concealed just around the
corner in a loose wrapper.

Spain at this time regarded the new land as a vast jewelry store in
charge of simple children of the forest who did not know the value of
their rich agricultural lands or gold-ribbed farms. Spain, therefore,
expected to exchange bone collar-buttons with the children of the forest
for opals as large as lima beans, and to trade fiery liquids to them for
large gold bricks.

The Montezumas were compelled every little while to pay a freight-bill
for the Spanish confidence man.

Ponce de Leon had started out in search of the Hot Springs of Arkansas,
and in 1512 came