Plodding wearily along at a snail's pace on the road that winds through Spanish hill-country were two travellers. Dust-caked and grimy, leading by the halter an aged nag, heads bowed, and pace ambling, the pair presented a picture of human dejection in the golden rays of the afternoon sun on that highway leading from the nation's capital to the borders of France. It was obvious that some blows had been dealt the men's fortunes, for every movement in their demeanor was a sign of discouragement, disappointment, defeat.

Suddenly, over the rill which the two had just passed, came the sound of galloping hoofs, and with it a courier, out of breath and panting on his well-accoutred charger. He had ridden miles, haste-post-haste, to catch the wanderers. He had news. Good news: the Queen would see them; she would help them! Come back to Cordoba. The Queen would sell her jewels that the traveller and his companion might have a fleet to seek a Western passage to the Indies and the far-flung realms of the East. . . .

The Vagabond smiled, as he thought of Isabella, wife of the ruler of proud Spain, forced to sacrifice the things that women love best to realize the dream of the daring seaman who was bold enough, heretical enough, to proclaim in the face of all existing dogma that the earth was round. He smiled, too, as he thought of his wanderings in the American waters--then as unknown as a black void and filled with infinite terrors, and the explorations, and the final failures and ultimate defeat of that gallant seafarer. He smiled, thinking of the way the sea often wins out against the boldest plans of men, of the mystery of the sea that made men still love to sail it, and suffer on it, and sometimes conquer it.

So the Vagabond decided to make his Columbus holiday different from just another day off from classes. Heading for Gloucester early in the morning he boarded his trim sloop and swung rapidly around the jetty on Eastern Point, laying a course for the whistling buoy off Thatcher Island on the tip of Cape Ann. Soon wisps of fog rolled in on the heels of a fresh southerly breeze, and he checked his position before losing all sight of the surrounding waters. Miraculously the fog blew away in a few minutes, and he saw the twin towers of lighthouses that stand on Thatcher Island, and the lovely shoreline shining in the afternoon sun. He thought of the buoys, charts, and lights, the aids to navigation, that make it possible for modern man to travel on the sea in safety; he thought especially of the first faint, fitful gleam that Columbus glimpsed at San Salvador when he reached these shores, and of the lighthouse soon to be erected in that same spot in the form of a cross to honor the memory of the man who discovered America.