At one place Harry suddenly stopped and pointed delightedly out of the little window.
“See!” he cried. “Isn’t that just right?”
Mr. Douglass turned, and gazing through the little opening saw the “Santa Maria” lying near the wharf opposite.
“It makes one feel as if he were back four hundred years,” said the tutor, quite as much delighted with this fortunate view as Harry was. “Looking through this little window, we see nothing of the crowd, and are all alone with the convent and the caravel.”
They were most interested in the “Columbus Room,” which occupied the place of the cell where lodged the monk who became interested in the man with a theory. There were dozens of portraits of Columbus, and they certainly gave one plenty of choice. Broad-faced, narrow-faced, round, oval, bearded, or smooth, the great discoverer might well have been puzzled to know which was his likeness. People’s remarks were droll enough.
One young woman who had been critically scrutinizing the array of “Columbuses, various,” finally stopped delightedly before a large portrait and exclaimed:
“Oh!—that’s more like him!”
Harry longed to ask how she knew that, but concluded it would get him into trouble. Harry himself had no choice. He felt just as another critical visitor did. This was a young man in a broad felt hat, who sailed around the room, and left with the parting remark:
“There isn’t one of them that looks alike!”
Mr. Douglass and Harry spent a long morning in the convent, but Harry wearied of it. He tried to be interested, for he wished to please his father; but he couldn’t find anything to take hold of in making a beginning. Still, by sitting quietly in the rooms and corridors, the boy, without realizing it, carried away a perfectly clear idea of the old convent, its arrangement, how Columbus must have been lodged and entertained, what the old documents were like, and how much modern maps differed from the rude charts of the Middle Ages.