the plums that fall on the grass from the Frenchman’s damson tree, they are as safe as if I locked them in the dresser here, are they not?  So ’t is when the King forbids his people to send their goods to some harbor; it is the same as if a great chain were stretched across that harbor with a great lock upon it.  Now run and play with Ludovico and Santo, Sebastiano mio, and be glad thou art free of a pleasant garden.”

But Sebastian still hung back, his dark head rubbing softly against his father’s shoulder.  “When I am a great merchant,” he announced, “the King will let me send my ships all over the world.”

John Cabot stroked the wavy dark hair with a lingering, tender touch.  “God grant thee thy wish, little one,” he said.  And Sebastian, with a shout in answer to a call from the sunny out-of-door world, scampered away.

John Cabot, who had been born in Genoa, married while a merchant in Venice, and had now lived for many years in Bristol, felt sometimes that the life of a trader was like that of a player at dice.  And the dice were often loaded.

He was a good navigator, or he would not have been a true son of the Genoese house of Caboto—­Giovanni Caboto translated meant John the Captain, and in a city full of sea-captains a man must know more than a little of the sea to win that title.  He had made a place for himself in Venice as Zuan Gaboto, and now he was a known and respected man in the second greatest seaport of England, with a house in the quarter of Bristol known as “Cathay,” the only part of the city where foreigners were allowed to live.  It had its nickname from the fact that the foreign trade of Bristol was largely with the Orient.

English trade in those days was hampered by a multitude of restrictions.  There were monopolies, there were laws forbidding the export of this and that, or the making of goods by any one outside certain guilds, there were arrangements favoring foreign traders who had got their foothold during the War of the Roses,—­when kings needed money from any source that would promise it.  The Hanse merchants at the Steelyard alone controlled the markets of more than a hundred towns.  Their grim stone buildings rose like a fort commanding London Bridge, and they paid less both in duties and customs than English merchants did.  They employed no English ships, and could underbuy and undersell the English manufacturer and the English trader.  Their men were all bachelors, with no families to found or houses to keep up in England.  The farmer might get half price for his wool and pay more than one price for whatever he was obliged to buy.  There was plenty of private exasperation, but no open fighting, against this ruling of the London markets by Hamburg, Luebeck, Antwerp and Cologne.  Cabot’s clear head and wide experience plainly showed him the enormous waste of such a system, but he did not see how to unlock the harbors.  Neither, at present, did the King, whose shrewd brain was at work on the problem.