The conning-tower was hardly big enough to lose one’s temper in, but gave the commanding officer full view of his surroundings through tiny slits cut through the solid steel. Electric buttons were convenient to push when he wished the guns, rifles, torpedoes, and other assistants to do the rest.
Leaving the vessel, Harry was again launched back to the other end of the grounds, landing at the Agricultural Building. He passed through this great show-house with his eyes well restrained, but did notice some birds flying about under the lofty roof. He wondered if they had come to study the best methods of securing a living at the farmers’ expense, and hoped rather that they wished to know what harmful insects it was best for them to destroy.
After eating lunch at a table in the open air near by, Harry boarded Columbus’s “Santa Maria.” Coming directly from a modern cruiser, the quaint little cockle-shell was a pathetic witness to the great discoverer’s hardships. Harry went into the forecastle, looked at the queer old galley, the swivel-gun, the anchors, and wished that he had been aboard the original on that first westward trip. The modern vessels were scientific, correct, and fine, of course; but somehow Harry would rather have sailed the ocean blue in the days when the galley-fires flared fitfully on these pictured sails.
“GUARDING”
THE “NIÑA.”
He skipped the “Pinta” and “Niña,” sketching from the shore a sailor on the latter who was “guarding” the little vessel, only reflecting that those on the biggest vessel were better off than their fellows in these two, and went over to the Convent de la Rábida. Harry thought everybody knew about that building; but he met a group of three men, one of whom asked in all earnestness, “That hain’t the Fisheries Buildin’, is it?” Then the boy remembered how amused the great Napoleon was when they brought to his court a man who had never heard of him, of the Empire, or of the Revolution! Harry wondered whether there might not be in the Fair Grounds a few who hardly recalled having heard of a man named Columbus.
Inside the convent were old charts, pictures, and manuscripts, to which Harry gave but a passing glance. But the open court inside at once gave him a sense of antiquity, and the tropical plants recalled thoughts of distant lands, until he caught sight of a tired man worrying a piece of mince-pie for lunch. He started to go out, and only paused before an old globe whereon the lands were full of odd pictures.
THE NEW “SANTA MARIA” CROSSING THE OCEAN.
“Geography must have been like a book of fairy-stories then,” he thought as he left the convent door and came face to face with to-day.