Probably few people have been more successful in the discovering line than
Christopher Columbus. Living as he did in a day when a great many things
were still in an undiscovered state, the horizon was filled with golden
opportunities for a man possessed of Mr. C.'s pluck and ambition. His life
at first was filled with rebuffs and disappointments, but at last he grew
to be a man of importance in his own profession, and the people who wanted
anything discovered would always bring it to him rather than take it
elsewhere.
And yet the life of Columbus was a stormy one. Though he discovered a
continent wherein a millionaire attracts no attention, he himself was very
poor.
Though he rescued from barbarism a broad and beautiful land in whose
metropolis the theft of less than half a million of dollars is regarded as
petty larceny, Chris himself often went to bed hungry. Is it not singular
that the gray-eyed and gentle Columbus should have added a hemisphere to
the history of our globe, a hemisphere, too, where pie is a common thing,
not only on Sunday, but throughout the week, and yet that he should have
gone down to his grave pieless!
Such is the history of progress in all ages and in all lines of thought
and investigation. Such is the meagre reward of the pioneer in new fields
of action.
I presume that America to-day has a larger pie area than any other land in
which the Cockney English language is spoken. Right here where millions of
native born Americans dwell, many of whom are ashamed of the fact that
they were born here and which shame is entirely mutual between the Goddess
of Liberty and themselves, we have a style of pie that no other land can
boast of.
From the bleak and acid dried apple pie of Maine to the irrigated mince
pie of the blue Pacific, all along down the long line of igneous, volcanic
and stratified pie, America, the land of the freedom bird with the high
instep to his nose, leads the world.
Other lands may point with undissembled pride to their polygamy and their
cholera, but we reck not. Our polygamy here is still in its infancy and
our leprosy has had the disadvantage of a cold, backward spring, but look
at our pie.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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