and beasts, which showed no signs of fear at their presence.  On the third day a storm arose, and raged for a night over the island; and in the morning the adventurers found that their ship was nowhere to be seen.  The despair of the little company was extreme, and was increased by the condition of poor Anne, upon whom terror and remorse again fell, and so preyed upon her mind that in three days she was dead.  Her lover, who had braved so much and won her so gallantly, was turned to stone by this misfortune.  Remorse and aching desolation oppressed him; from the moment of her death he scarcely ate nor spoke; and in five days he also was dead, surely of a broken heart.  They buried him beside his mistress under a spreading tree, and put up a wooden cross there, with a prayer that any Christians who might come to the island would build a chapel to Jesus the Saviour.  The rest of the party then repaired their little boat and put to sea; were cast upon the coast of Morocco, captured by the Moors, and thrown into prison.  With them in prison was a Spanish pilot named Juan de Morales, who listened attentively to all they could tell him about the situation and condition of the island, and who after his release communicated what he knew to Prince Henry of Portugal.  The island of Madeira was thus rediscovered in 1418, and in 1425 was colonised by Prince Henry, who appointed as Governor Bartolomeo de Perestrello, whose daughter was afterwards to become the wife of Columbus.

So much for the outposts of the Old World.  Of the New World, about the possibility of which Columbus is beginning to dream as he sails the Mediterranean, there was no knowledge and hardly any thought.  Though new in the thoughts of Columbus, it was very old in itself; generations of men had lived and walked and spoken and toiled there, ever since men came upon the earth; sun and shower, the thrill of the seasons, birth and life and death, had been visiting it for centuries and centuries.  And it is quite possible that, long before even the civilisation that produced Columbus was in its dawn, men from the Old World had journeyed there.  There are two very old fragments of knowledge which indicate at least the possibility of a Western World of which the ancients had knowledge.  There is a fragment, preserved from the fourth century before Christ, of a conversation between Silenus and Midas, King of Phrygia, in which Silenus correctly describes the Old World—­Europe, Asia, and Africa—­as being surrounded by the sea, but also describes, far to the west of it, a huge island, which had its own civilisation and its own laws, where the animals and the men were of twice our stature, and lived for twice our years.  There is also the story told by Plato of the island of Atlantis, which was larger than Africa and Asia together, and which in an earthquake disappeared beneath the waves, producing such a slime upon the surface that no ship was able to navigate the sea in that place.  This is the story which the priests of Sais told to Solon, and which was embodied in the sacred inscriptions in their temples.  It is strange that any one should think of this theory of the slime who had not seen or heard of the Sargasso Sea—­that great bank of floating seaweed that the ocean currents collect and retain in the middle of the basin of the North Atlantic.