comes not from the man who
discovered it, but from his friend and comrade Americus Vespucius.

Like Columbus, this Americus Vespucius was an Italian; like him, he was
a daring sailor and a fearless adventurer, sailing into strange seas
to see what he could find. He saw more of the American coast than did
Columbus, and not being so full of the gold-hunting and slave-getting
fever as was the Admiral, he brought back from his four voyages so much
information about the new-found lands across the sea, that scholars, who
cared more for news than gold, became interested in what he reported.
And some of the map-makers in France, when they had to name the new
lands in the West that they drew on their maps--the lands that were not
the Indies, nor China, nor Japan--called them after the man who had told
them so much about them--Americus Vespucius. And so it is that to-day
you live in America and not in Columbia, as so many people have thought
this western world of ours should be named.

And even the titles, and riches, and honors that the king and queen of
Spain promised to Columbus came very near being lost by his family,
as they had been by himself. It was only by the hardest work, and by
keeping right at it all the time, that the Admiral's eldest son, Diego
Columbus, almost squeezed out of King Ferdinand of Spain the things that
had been promised to his father.

But Diego was as plucky, and as brave, and as persistent as his father
had been; then, too, he had lived at court so long--he was one of the
queen's pages, you remember that he knew just what to do and how to act
so as to get what he wanted. And at last he got it.

He was made Viceroy over the Indies; he went across the seas to Hayti,
and in his palace in the city of Santo Domingo he ruled the lands his
father had found, and which for centuries were known as the Spanish
Main; he was called Don Diego; he married a high-born lady of Spain, the
niece of King Ferdinand; he received the large share of "the riches of
the Indies" that his father had worked for, but never received. And the
family of Christopher Columbus, the Genoese adventurer--under the title
of the Dukes of Veragua--have, ever since Don Diego's day, been of what
is called "the best blood of Spain."

If you have read this story of Christopher Columbus aright, you must
have come to the conclusion that the life of this Italian sea captain
who discovered a new world was not a happy one. From first to last it