continually letting the ship’s head fall off to the north; and many must have been the angry remonstrances from the captain to the man at the wheel.  Altogether rather a trying day for Christopher, who surely has about as much on his hands as ever mortal had; but he knows how to handle ships and how to handle sailors, and so long as this ten-knot breeze lasts, he can walk the high poop of the Santa Maria with serenity, and snap his fingers at the dirty rabble below.

On Monday they made sixty leagues, the Admiral duly announcing forty-eight; on Tuesday twenty leagues, published as sixteen; and on this day they saw a large piece of a mast which had evidently belonged to a ship of at least 120 tons burden.  This was not an altogether cheerful sight for the eighteen souls on board the little Nina, who wondered ruefully what was going to happen to them of forty tons when ships three times their size had evidently been unable to live in this abominable sea!

On Thursday, September 13th, when Columbus took his observations, he made a great scientific discovery, although he did not know it at the time.  He noticed that the needle of the compass was declining to the west of north instead of having a slight declination to the east of north, as all mariners knew it to have.  In other words, he had passed the line of true north and of no variation, and must therefore have been in latitude 28 deg.  N. and longitude 29 deg. 37’ W. of Greenwich.  With his usual secrecy he said nothing about it; perhaps he was waiting to see if the pilots on the other ships had noticed it, but apparently they were not so exact in their observations as he was.  On the next day, Friday, the wind falling a little lighter, they, made only twenty leagues.  “Here the persons on the caravel Nina said they had seen a jay and a ringtail, and these birds never come more than twenty-five leagues from land at most.”  —­Unhappy “persons on the Nina”!  Nineteen souls, including the captain, afloat in a very small boat, and arguing God knows what from the fact that a jay and a ringtail never went more than twenty-five leagues from land!—­The next day also was not without its incident; for on Saturday evening they saw a meteor, or “marvellous branch of fire” falling from the serene violet of the sky into the sea.

They were now well within the influence of the trade-wind, which in these months blows steadily from the east, and maintains an exquisite and balmy climate.  Even the Admiral, never very communicative about his sensations, deigns to mention them here, and is reported to have said that “it was a great pleasure to enjoy the morning; that nothing was lacking except to hear the nightingales, and that the weather was like April in Andalusia.”  On this day they saw some green grasses, which the Admiral considered must have floated off from some island; “not the continent,” says the Admiral, whose theories are not to be disturbed by a piece of grass, “because I make the continental land farther onward.”  The crew, ready to take the most depressing and pessimistic view of everything, considered that the lumps of grass belonged to rocks or submerged lands, and murmured disparaging things about the Admiral.  As a matter of fact these grasses were masses of seaweed detached from the Sargasso Sea, which they were soon to enter.