At a shot from the mizzenmast of a French ship, the Lord Admiral fell. Captain Hardy of the Victory knelt beside him.
“They have done for me at last, Hardy,” he gasped.
Nelson lived for hours, giving his last directions, then died in the moment of his greatest triumph.
“Now I am satisfied,” were his last words. “Thank God, I have done my duty.”
DISCOVERERS AND EXPLORERS
COLUMBUS, THE MAP-MAKER WHO FOUND A NEW WORLD
IN a tall narrow house in the midst of a block on a narrow street in Genoa, Italy, lived a poor woolworker named Columbus. This slender house was only two windows wide and seven stories high. In the lowest story, in which there were a wide door and a grated window, Signor Columbus stored the bales of wool which he washed and carded, using a tool somewhat like the curry-comb for cleaning horses. He thus prepared the wool to be spun into yarn, which would later be woven and made up into clothing and blankets.
A small boy named Christopher went in and out of this foul-smelling place to play and work. Very little is known of the boyhood of Columbus. As Genoa was a large seaport town, it is supposed that he spent much of his time on the wharves watching the boats-galleys from Venice, with gay-colored sails, and strange-looking craft from Asia and Africa, with long, slim, lateen wings, veering about like swallows of the sea.
There were pirates, or highway-robbers of the sea, in those days. Little Christopher was sure to hear thrilling stories of how they fought hand-to-hand with sabers and axes, and of how the wicked but powerful pirates murdered the men on merchant ships and carried off the women and children to be slaves in distant lands. Young Columbus seems to have been fired with a boyish longing for—
“A life on the ocean wave,
A home on the rolling deep,”