pleased God to bring him at length where he might grapple with its unknown dangers. Admiring its illimitable but placid surface, and exulting in the meditation of its secret perils soon to be tried, he courteously imposed on it the name it is for ever to bear, "the Pacific Ocean." While baffling for an entry into it, he observed with surprise that in the month of October the nights are only four hours long, and "considered, in this his navigation, that the pole antartike hath no notable star like the pole artike, but that there be two clouds of little stars somewhat dark in the middest, also a cross of fine clear stars, but that here the needle becomes so sluggish that it needs must be moved with a bit of loadstone before it will rightly point." [Sidenote: The Pacific Ocean crossed.] And now the great sailor, having burst through the barrier of the American continent, steered for the north-west, attempting to regain the equator. For three months and twenty days he sailed on the Pacific, and never saw inhabited land. He was compelled by famine to strip off the pieces of skin and leather wherewith his rigging was here and there bound, to soak them in the sea and then soften them with warm water, so as to make a wretched food; to eat the sweepings of the ship and other loathsome matter; to drink water that had become putrid by keeping; and yet he resolutely held on his course, though his men were dying daily. As is quaintly observed, "their gums grew over their teeth, and so they could not eat." He estimated that he sailed over this unfathomable sea not less than 12,000 miles. In the whole history of human undertakings there is nothing that exceeds, if indeed there is anything that equals, this voyage of Magellan's. That of Columbus dwindles away in comparison. It is a display of superhuman courage, superhuman perseverance--a display of resolution not to be diverted from its purpose by any motive or any suffering, but inflexibly persisting to its end. Well might his despairing sailors come to the conclusion that they had entered on a trackless waste of waters, endless before them and hopeless in a return. "But, though the Church hath evermore from Holy Writ affirmed that the earth should be a wide-spread plain bordered by the waters, yet he comforted himself when he considered that in the eclipses of the moon the shadow cast of the earth is round; and as is the shadow, such, in like manner, is the substance." It was a stout heart--a heart of triple brass--which could thus, against such authority, extract unyielding faith from a shadow.