et. At last, however, all was ready, and
with a company of two hundred men, besides his sailors, Columbus hoisted
anchor in the little port of San Lucar just north of Cadiz, near the
mouth of the Guadalquivir river, and sailed away into the West.

This time he was determined to find the continent of Asia. Even though,
as you remember, he made his men sign a paper saying that the coast of
Cuba was Asia, he really seems to have doubted this himself. He felt
that he had only found islands. If so, he said, Cathay must be the other
side of those islands; and Cathay is what I must find.

So, with this plan in mind, he sent three of his ships to the little
settlement of Isabella, and with the other three he sailed more to the
southwest. On the first of August the ships came in sight of the three
mountain peaks of the large island he called Trindad, or Trinity.

Look on your map of South America and you will see that Trinidad lies
almost in the mouth of the Orinoco, a mighty river in the northern part
of South America.

Columbus coasted about this island, and as he did so, looking across
to the west, he saw what he supposed to be still another island. It was
not. It was the coast of South America. For the first time, but without
knowing it, Columbus saw the great continent he had so long been hunting
for, though he had been seeking it under another name.

So you see, the story of Columbus shows how his life was full of
mistakes. In his first voyage he found an island and thought it was the
mainland of the Eastern Hemisphere; in his third voyage he discovered
the mainland of the New World and thought it only an island off the
coast of the Old World. His life was full of mistakes, but those
mistakes have turned out to be, for us, glorious successes.

CHAPTER X. FROM PARADISE TO PRISON.

If you know a boy or a girl whose mind is set on any one thing, you will
find that they are always talking about that thing. Is not this so? They
have what people call a "hobby" (which is a kind of a horse, you know),
and they are apt, as we say, to "ride their hobby to death."

If this is true of certain boys and girls, it is even more true of men
and women. They get to be what we call people of one idea, and whatever
they see or whatever they do always turns on that one idea.

It was so with Columbus. All his life his one idea had been the finding
of Asia--the Indies, or Cathay, as he called it--by sailing to the west.
He did sail t