would might gather wealth as he would idly pick up pebbles on a beach. These were the sober realities of the times; and there were few so poor in spirit or so lacking in imagination as not to desire to share in the possession of these new Indies. It was not long, indeed, before a reaction came; when disappointed adventurers returned in poverty, and sat in rags at the gates of the palace to beg relief of the King. And when the sons of Columbus, who were pages in the Court of the Queen, passed by, “they shouted to the very heavens, saying: ‘Look at the sons of the Admiral of Mosquitoland!—of that man who has discovered the lands of deceit and disappointment,—a place of sepulchre and wretchedness to Spanish hidalgos!’”[451] From his second voyage Columbus returned in the summer of 1496; and meeting his enemies with the courage and energy which never failed him, he induced the King and Queen to revoke, in June of the next year, the decree of two years before. Meanwhile he made preparations for his third voyage, on which he sailed from San Lucar on the 30th of May, 1498. Two months later he came in sight of the island he named Trinidad; and entering the Gulf of Paria, into which empties the Orinoco by several mouths, he sailed along the coast of the mainland. He had reached the continent, not of Asia, as he supposed, but of the western hemisphere. None of the four voyages of the great discoverer is so illustrative of his peculiar faith, his religious fervor, and the strength of his imagination as this third voyage; and none, in that respect, is so interesting. The report of it which he sent home in a letter, with a map, to the King and Queen has a direct relation to the supposed first voyage of Amerigo Vespucci.