Thus terminated the first attempt of Spaniards to plant a colony on the main-land of North America. Columbus himself, the leader, advanced with proffers of friendship in one hand and a sword in the other, retaliated upon a fancied savage treachery by a still more insidious treachery, and was driven from the country by a brave ruler, whose deeds deserve to be enrolled beside those of patriots everywhere. One kind act of a tender-hearted Spanish sailor—would I had more of them to record in this history—brings the direst misfortune on his countrymen, delays for a dozen years the occupation of Veragua, and turns the tide of conquest in other directions. * * * * * [Sidenote: CHARACTER OF COLUMBUS.] Most remarkable in the character of Columbus was the combination of the theoretical and the practical; and most remarkable in his theories was the anomaly that though nearly all of them were false, they led to as grand results as if they had been true. The aperture through which failure creeps into carefully laid schemes is usually some glaring defect of character; and such defect often appears where little suspected, in natures warped by genius, or where one quality is unduly developed at the expense of another quality. We often see men of rare ability wrecked by what would be regarded an act of folly unaccountable in the stupidest person; but we do not often see success resulting from these same defects. The greatest defect in the faculties of Columbus, extravagance of belief, was the primary cause of his success. Simple to us as is the reality of the earth's rotundity, and of the practicability of a western route to Asia, no one could then have entertained those doctrines without extraordinary credulity; even though Pythagoras and others had so long ago expressed such ideas, no one could then have acted on them short of infatuation bordering on insanity. To say the world is round was not enough; Thales of Miletus proved it not a plane two thousand years before. If it were round, the water would run off; if it were flat, why then one safely might sail on it; if it be flat, and the water runs not off, then at the other end there must be land that keeps the water on, and one might sail over the flat sea to that land—all such logic was less puerile than the feelings by which the Genoese ordinarily reached conclusions. His efforts were the embodiment of the ideas of many thoughtful men, timorous persons, perhaps, or merely meditative and passive, but in none of whom united his ability, courage, and enthusiasm; above all, none so scientific were at the same time so determined. Often the knowledge of a prophecy is the cause of its fulfilment. Some say Alonso Sanchez told him of Española, and he himself affirms that once he visited Iceland. It may have been that on this voyage he learned from the Norsemen of their Vinland and Helluland. What then? Were this true, such stories would have had with