To assist Columbus and to conduct the business of exploration and colonization, Archdeacon Juan Rodriguez de Fonseca was made a sort of Secretary of Exploration and Superintendent of Indian Affairs, and was given very extensive powers. It may seem to us strange that a priest should have received this appointment, but priests were as numerous in Spain as Colonels now are in South Carolina, and probably all the men who were not priests were either in jail or had volunteered to join Columbus as sailors and gold-hunters. It was this able Archdeacon who chiefly organized the second expedition of Columbus, and he engaged twelve active priests well acquainted with the screw, the pulley, the wheel, and the other theologico-mechanical powers, and commanded by the Apostolic Vicar Rev. Bernardo Boyle, to convert the heathen as fast as they should be discovered. It would violate all precedent if the story of Columbus and the egg were to be spared the readers of this volume. It is briefly as follows: Soon after his return to Spain he dined with Cardinal de Mendoza, an eminent clergyman with a talent for dinner. An objectionable young man who was present, and who undoubtedly had taken more champagne than was good for his fellow-diners, asked the Admiral if he did not think that if he had not discovered the New World some one else would very shortly have discovered it. He was unquestionably an impertinent young man, but he was undoubtedly right in assuming that sooner or later the Atlantic would have been crossed, even if Columbus had never been born. Historians tell us that Columbus, in reply, asked the young man if he could stand an egg on its little end; and when the young man, after rudely inquiring what Columbus was giving him, was constrained to admit that he could not perform the feat in question, the great explorer simply flattened the little end of the egg by knocking it against the table, and then easily made it stand upright. The whole company instantly burst into tears, and exclaimed that Columbus was the greatest and noblest of mankind.