'Ούρανὁϛ ἀνω ούρανόϛ κάτω.'

(Heaven above—heaven below.)

Tabula Smaragdina.

I

'See here! On the map of the Indian Ocean, westward of the island of Taprobane, we find a note—"The Sirens: prodigies of the sea." Christopher Columbus told me that having come there and found no sirens, he was greatly astonished. But you smile. Why?'

'Oh, nothing! Go on, Guido; I am listening.'

'I know very well, Messer Leonardo, that you don't believe in sirens! Well, and what would you say of the skiapodes, who use their feet as parasols; or the pygmies, whose ears are so large that they make one a bolster, the other a blanket; or of the tree which bears eggs for its fruit, from which come yellow downy chickens, so fishy-flavoured they may be eaten on fast-days; or of that marine monster upon which certain mariners, believing it an island, disembarked and lighted a fire for the cooking of their supper? This last is a very true tale, related by an aged mariner from Lisbon, a man in no wise given to wine, and who swore and swore again by the blood and the body of Christ, that he spoke what was true.'

This conversation took place six years after the discovery of the New World, on Palm Sunday, at Florence, in a room above the storehouse of Messer Pompeo Berardi, a shipbuilder, who had a branch establishment at Seville, and superintended there the building of ships for sailing to the New Continent. Messer Guido Berardi, Pompeo's nephew, was an impassioned seaman; he had prepared to take part in Vasco di Gama's expedition, when he was stricken by the terrible disease called French by the Italians, and Italian by the French; German by the Poles, Polish by the Muscovites, Christian by the Turks. In vain he had consulted all physicians, in vain he had made waxen offerings at every wonder-working shrine; paralysed, condemned to eternal immobility, he preserved an extraordinary activity of mind, and by listening to sailors' stories, and sitting up all night over books and maps, he sailed the oceans of imagination, and made discoveries by proxy. His room, which sextants, compasses, astrolabes, made like a ship's cabin, opened on to a balcony, a Florentine loggia. The clear sky of a spring evening was already darkening; the flame of the lamp flickered in the wind; from the storehouse below were wafted odours of spices—cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves.

'And so, Messer Leonardo,' he concluded, rubbing his unhappy legs under their coverlet, ''tis not meaningless the saying that faith removes mountains. Had Columbus doubted like you, he had accomplished naught. Confess, I pray you, is it not worth grey hair at thirty to have found the Earthly Paradise?'

'Paradise?' said Leonardo; 'nay, how is that?'