lip's sight was a little group
of Byzantines who were the guests of honour. They wore fantastic
headdresses and long female robes, above which their flowing dyed beards
and their painted eyebrows looked like masks of Carnival time. After
Battista's gravity their vain eyes and simpering tones seemed an
indecent folly. These were the folk he had called friends, this the life
he had once cherished. Assuredly he was well rid of it.

He grasped Battista's hand.

"I will go with you," he said, "over the edge of the world."

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

As it happened Philip de Laval did not sail with Columbus in that first
voyage which brought him to San Salvador in the Bahamas. But he and
Battista were in the second expedition, when the ship under the command
of the latter was separated by a storm from her consorts, and driven on
a westerly course when the others had turned south. It was believed to
be lost, and for two years nothing was heard of its fate. At the end of
that time a tattered little vessel reached Bordeaux, and Philip landed
on the soil of Franc. He had a strange story to tell. The ship had been
caught up by a current which had borne it north for the space of fifteen
days till landfall was made on the coast of what we now call South
Carolina. There it had been beached in an estuary, while the crew
adventured inland. The land was rich enough, but the tribes were not the
gentle race of Battista's imagining. There had been a savage struggle
for mastery, till the strangers made alliances and were granted
territory between the mountains and the sea. But they were only a
handful and Philip was sent back for further colonists and for a cargo
of arms and seeds and implements.

The French court was in no humour for his tale, being much involved in
its own wars. It may be that he was not believed; anyhow he got no help
from his king. At his own cost and with the aid of friends he fitted out
his ship for the return. After that the curtain falls. It would appear
that the colony did not prosper, for it is on record that Philip in the
year 1521 was living at his house at Eaucourt, a married man, occupied
with books and the affairs of his little seigneury. A portrait of him
still extant by an Italian artist shows a deeply furrowed face and stern
brows, as of one who had endured much, but the eyes are happy. It is
believed that in his last years he was one of the first of the gentlemen
of Picardy to adhere