In a tall narrow house in the midst of a block on a narrow street in Genoa, Italy, lived a poor woolworker named Columbus. This slender house was only two windows wide and seven stories high. In the lowest story, in which there were a wide door and a grated window, Signor Columbus stored the bales of wool which he washed and carded, using a tool somewhat like the curry-comb for cleaning horses. He thus prepared the wool to be spun into yarn, which would later be woven and made up into clothing and blankets. A small boy named Christopher went in and out of this foul-smelling place to play and work. Very little is known of the boyhood of Columbus. As Genoa was a large seaport town, it is supposed that he spent much of his time on the wharves watching the boats-galleys from Venice, with gay-colored sails, and strange-looking craft from Asia and Africa, with long, slim, lateen wings, veering about like swallows of the sea. There were pirates, or highway-robbers of the sea, in those days. Little Christopher was sure to hear thrilling stories of how they fought hand-to-hand with sabers and axes, and of how the wicked but powerful pirates murdered the men on merchant ships and carried off the women and children to be slaves in distant lands. Young Columbus seems to have been fired with a boyish longing for-- “A life on the ocean wave, A home on the rolling deep,” for the next that is known of him is that he narrowly escaped from drowning in a shipwreck by swimming six miles to shore on a boat oar. He landed near a town in Portugal and soon found work in a map-maker’s shop. Here he had a chance to learn all the geography that was known four hundred years ago. Most of the maps he made were drawn as if the world were flat. But there were curious charts with lands and seas outlined on the six sides of a cube, and others drawn as if the world were shaped like a huge section of stovepipe. Young Columbus found the maps very interesting; but what seemed most wonderful of all was the idea that the world was round, as every child now knows. In those days a man was not allowed to believe anything different from what every one else thought. So when young Columbus began to claim that the earth was round, people laughed at him. They thought he was crazy. Of course, a few astronomers and scientists knew how to prove the roundness of the earth by the shadow it casts on the moon in an eclipse, but most of the people could not understand such things. Columbus himself could notice that the surface of the ocean, within the short distance he could see, was slightly curved. He resolved to miss no chance to prove his theory, by learning all he could about newly-found lands; and he even began planning to sail around the earth to India and Far Cathay, as China was called in the old days.