longings, though to all others they seemed the merest dreams. Mr. Lowell makes him say

I know not when this hope enthralled me first,
But from my boyhood up I loved to hear
The tall pine forests of the Apennine

Murmur their hoary legends of the sea . . . .

I heard Ulysses tell of mountain chains

Whose adamantine links, his manacles,

The western main shook growling, and still gnawed;

I brooded on the wise Athenian's tale

Of happy Atlantis, and heard Björne's keel

Crunch the gray pebbles of the Vineland shore,
For I believed the poets.

It is true that the great mariner read all that he could about old Ocean, and though he may have believed the poets, he certainly did not have the same faith in all that he found in prose. He determined, however, to seek, at whatever cost, to solve the mysteries of the sea. He read in the greatest authority of the time that the ocean encircled the ultimate bounds of the inhabited earth, and that beyond it all was unknown. "No one," said this writer, "has been able to verify

anything concerning it, on account of its difficult and perilous navigation, its great obscurity, its profound depth and frequent tempests; through fear of its mighty fishes and its haughty winds; yet there are many islands in it, some peopled, others uninhabited. There is no mariner who dares to enter into its deep waters or, if any have done so, they have merely kept along its coasts, fearful of departing from them." This was the picture the wise man drew, but his tempests, obscurity, haughty winds and mighty fishes could not daunt Columbus. He made his bold push westward and was successful. All Europe rang with the praises of his wondrous discovery. The age of romance was brought back and men opened eager ears to every tale that pretended to come over seas, and the new Western World became the place of marvels and the most promising region for the lover of adventure to visit. It was said that sirens, who had not been seen since the days of Ulysses, inhabited some of the islands, and that no ship bearing iron could sail near others on account of the loadstone they contained. These

facts may be seen written down on the maps of the time even now, and they were then believed. We cannot put ourselves into the position of the people of those days when all science was in its infancy, if, indeed, modern science can be said to have been born at the time.

Among the many gazers westward who were incited to seek their fortunes in the new land, was one Francisco Pizarro, a man of low birth, intense selfishness, and fiendish cruelty. He made a number of incursions into regions of South America to get gold. One of these incursions was made in 1531, and in it he had the assistance of the king of Spain, who was likewise greedy for gold. It was the next year that he captured the Inca of Peru and put him to death unmercifully, after having exacted a ransom of fifteen million dollars for his life. The following year he took the capital of the country, Cuzco, and eight years later he was killed by a son of one of his followers who had suffered from him.

Let us now turn from the picture of ambition and covetousness to a brighter story, of love and