O Lord, I commit
my spirit! the Admiral of the Ocean Seas, the Viceroy of the Indies,
the Discoverer of a New World, ended his fight for life. Christopher
Columbus was dead.

He was but sixty years old. With Tennyson, and Whittier, and Gladstone,
and De Lesseps living to be over eighty, and with your own good
grandfather and grandmother, though even older than Columbus, by no
means ready to be called old people, sixty years seems an early age to
be so completely broken and bent and gray as was he. But trouble,
and care, and exposure, and all the worries and perils of his life of
adventure, had, as you must know, so worn upon Columbus that when he
died he seemed to be an old, old man. He was white-haired, you remember,
even before he discovered America, and each year he seemed to grow older
and grayer and more feeble.

And after he had died in that lonely house in Valladolid, the world
seems for a time to have almost forgotten him. A few friends followed
him to the grave; the king, for whom he had done so much, did not
trouble himself to take any notice of the death of his Admiral, whom
once he had been forced to honor, receive and reward. The city of
Valladolid, in which Columbus died, was one of those fussy little towns
in which everybody knew what was happening next door, and talked and
argued about whatever happened upon its streets and in its homes; and
yet even Valladolid hardly seemed to know of the presence within its
gates of the sick "Viceroy of the Indies." Not until four weeks after
his death did the Valladolid people seem to realize what had happened;
and then all they did was to write down this brief record: "The said
Admiral is dead."

To-day, the bones of Columbus inclosed in a leaden casket lie in the
Cathedral of Santo Domingo. People have disputed about the place where
the Discoverer of America was born; they are disputing about the place
where he is buried. But as it seems now certain that he was born in
Genoa, so it seems also certain that his bones are really in the tomb
in the old Cathedral at Santo Domingo, that old Haytian city which he
founded, and where he had so hard a time.

At least a dozen places in the Old World and the New have built
monuments and statues in his honor; in the United States, alone, over
sixty towns and villages bear his name, or the kindred one of Columbia.
The whole world honors him as the Discoverer of America; and yet the
very name that the Western Hemisphere bears