One day a traveller rang at the gate and asked for refreshment for himself and his son. Being interrogated as to the object of his journey, he replied that he was on his way to the court of Spain to communicate an important matter to the king and queen. The traveller was Christopher Columbus. How he came to pass by this obscure monastery--which lay altogether off his route--has never been explained. A providential guidance had brought him into the presence of the man the best calculated to comprehend his purpose, in a country where he was totally without friends and with whose language he was completely unacquainted. A common sympathy drew them together; and Columbus, accepting for a period the hospitality of Marchena, made him the confidant of his views. Thus, while the colleges and universities of Christendom still held the childish theory that the earth was flat, and that the sea was the path to utter and outer darkness, Columbus and Marchena, filled with a spontaneous and implicit faith, intuitively believed in the sphericity of the globe and the existence of a nameless continent beyond the ocean. In theory they had solved the great question whether the ship which should depart by the west would come back by the east. Marchena gave Columbus a letter of recommendation to the queen's confessor, and, during his absence, promised to educate and maintain his son Diego. Thus tranquillized in his affections, and aided in his schemes, Columbus departed for Cordova. Here he was destined to undergo another disappointment; for the queen's confessor, his expected patron, treated him as a dreaming speculator and needy adventurer. He soon became again isolated and forgotten. In the midst of his indigence, however, a noble lady, Beatrix Enriquez, young and beautiful, though not rich, noticed his manners and his language, so evidently above his condition, and detained him at Cordova long after his hopes were extinguished. He married her: she bore him a son, Fernando, who afterwards became his father's biographer and historian.