Another story which they were very fond of telling was, that a giant called Mildum had actually seen in the western sea an island of gold, with walls of crystal, and offered to swim to it with a ship in tow; but a storm came up, and the giant went ashore and died, and no one ever found the golden island. But there were some things which made it seem as though there really might be land somewhere out in the Atlantic. For instance, Columbus' brother-in-law had seen a piece of curiously carved wood which had been washed ashore in a westerly gale, and an old pilot had picked up a carved paddle very far west of Portugal. These things were very unlike anything that the Europeans had ever seen before, and they of course supposed that they must have been made by some unknown race of men. Then, besides, cane-stalks of tropic growth had been washed on the Madeiras, and great pine-trees on the Azores; and once, strangest thing of all, two drowned men, of different dress and looks from any they had ever known, had been found on the island of Flores. All these had come from the West--that great, curious, unknown West! Can you not imagine how the little children would go down to the shore and look across the sea, and wonder and wonder what lay beyond it? They had heard such strange stories of giants and monsters and cruel beasts, who were said to live away off there out of the sight of land, and it all seemed so curious to them. They could not believe that there was really land out beyond that blue sea, on which sometimes they could not even see a sail. It only looked to them like a great empty stretch of water, and they felt just as you would feel if you looked up to the sky some cloudless day. You would see nothing but the empty blue stretching away and away and away. Would you not laugh if some one said to you, "Come, let us take a boat and sail away into the sky, and find a new country that some one says is there?" Well, in those days, almost every one thought it was just as silly to suppose there was land on the other side of the Atlantic. But there were some people who really believed there was land lying across the great sea, and one of those persons was Columbus. He was a very wise man, and had learned all that was then known of geography, and he felt sure from many things that the earth was round in shape, and that if he sailed west across the Atlantic, he would come to land. He did not dream of finding a new country, but he thought that the world was much smaller than it really is, and that by sailing westward he would come to India much sooner than by going the usual way.