clothes-lines from which thousands of brightly-dyed garments are always hanging and fluttering; higher still, where the top storeys of the houses become merged in roof, there are little patches of garden and greenery, where geraniums and delicious tangling creepers uphold thus high above the ground the fertile tradition of earth.  You walk slowly up the paved street.  One of its characteristics, which it shares with the old streets of most Italian towns, is that it is only used by foot-passengers, being of course too narrow for wheels; and it is paved across with flagstones from door to door, so that the feet and the voices echo pleasantly in it, and make a music of their own.  Without exception the ground floor of every house is a shop—­the gayest, busiest most industrious little shops in the world.  There are shops for provisions, where the delightful macaroni lies in its various bins, and all kinds of frugal and nourishing foods are offered for sale.  There are shops for clothes and dyed finery; there are shops for boots, where boots hang in festoons like onions outside the window—­I have never seen so many boot-shops at once in my life as I saw in the streets surrounding the house of Columbus.  And every shop that is not a provision-shop or a clothes-shop or a boot-shop, is a wine-shop—­or at least you would think so, until you remember, after you have walked through the street, what a lot of other kinds of shops you have seen on your way.  There are shops for newspapers and tobacco, for cheap jewellery, for brushes, for chairs and tables and articles of wood; there are shops with great stacks and piles of crockery; there are shops for cheese and butter and milk—­indeed from this one little street in Genoa you could supply every necessary and every luxury of a humble life.

As you still go up, the street takes a slight bend; and immediately before you, you see it spanned by the lofty crumbled arch of St. Andrew’s Gate, with its two mighty towers one on each side.  Just as you see it you are at Columbus’s house.  The number is thirty-seven; it is like any of the other houses, tall and narrow; and there is a slab built into the wall above the first storey, on which is written this inscription:—­

NVLLA DOMVS TITVLO DIGNIOR
HEIC
PATERNIS in AEDIBV
CHRISTOPHORVS COLVMBVS
PVERITIAM
PRIMAMQVE IVVENTAM TRANSEGIT

You stop and look at it; and presently you become conscious of a difference between it and all the other houses.  They are all alert, busy, noisy, crowded with life in every storey, oozing vitality from every window; but of all the narrow vertical strips that make up the houses of the street, this strip numbered thirty-seven is empty, silent, and dead.  The shutters veil its windows; within it is dark, empty of furniture, and inhabited only by a memory and a spirit.  It is a strange place in which to stand and to think of all that has happened since the man of our thoughts looked forth from these windows, a