then at Palos, owning the vineyards round about, and whose descendants live there to this day.  Pinzon was a listener after Columbus’s own heart; he not only believed in his project, but offered to assist it with money, and even to accompany the expedition himself.  Altogether a happy and peaceful time, in which hopes revived, and the inner light that, although it had now and then flickered, had never gone out, burned up again in a bright and steady flame.

At the end of a fortnight, and much sooner than had been expected, the worthy pilot returned with a letter from the Queen.  Eager hands seized it and opened it; delight beamed from the eyes of the good Prior.  The Queen was most cordial to him, thanked him for his intervention, was ready to listen to him and even to be convinced by him; and in the meantime commanded his immediate appearance at the Court, asking that Columbus would be so good as to wait at La Rabida until he should hear further from her.  Then followed such a fussing and fuming, such a running hither and thither, and giving and taking of instructions and clatter of tongues as even the convent of La Rabida had probably never known.  Nothing will serve the good old busybody, although it is now near midnight, but that he must depart at once.  He will not wait for daylight; he will not, the good honest soul! wait at all.  He must be off at once; he must have this, he must have that; he will take this, he will leave that behind; or no, he will take that, and leave this behind.  He must have a mule, for his old feet will not bear him fast enough; ex-confessors of Her Majesty, moreover, do not travel on foot; and after more fussing and running hither and thither a mule is borrowed from one Juan Rodriguez Cabezudo of Moguer; and with a God-speed from the group standing round the lighted doorway, the old monk sets forth into the night.

It is a strange thing to consider what unimportant flotsam sometimes floats visibly upon the stream of history, while the gravest events are sunk deep beneath its flood.  We would give a king’s ransom to know events that must have taken place in any one of twenty years in the life of Columbus, but there is no sign of them on the surface of the stream, nor will any fishing bring them to light.  Yet here, bobbing up like a cork, comes the name of Juan Rodriguez Cabezudo of Moguer, doubtless a good worthy soul, but, since he has been dead these four centuries and more, of no interest or importance to any human being; yet of whose life one trivial act, surviving the flood of time which has engulfed all else that he thought important, falls here to be recorded:  that he did, towards midnight of a day late in December 1491 lend a mule to Friar Juan Perez.