The Project Gutenberg eBook, Christopher and Columbus, by Countess
Elizabeth Von Arnim, Illustrated by Arthur Litle

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Title: Christopher and Columbus

Author: Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim

Release Date: January 10, 2005 [eBook #14646]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHRISTOPHER AND COLUMBUS***

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CHRISTOPHER AND COLUMBUS

By the Author of _Elizabeth and Her German Garden_

Frontispiece by Arthur Litle

Garden City New York
Doubleday, Page & Company

1919

[Illustration: "Oh, yes. You're both very fond of me," said Mr. Twist,
pulling his mouth into a crooked and unhappy smile.

"We love you." said Anna-Felicitas simply.]

CHAPTER I

Their names were really Anna-Rose and Anna-Felicitas; but they decided,
as they sat huddled together in a corner of the second-class deck of the
American liner _St. Luke_, and watched the dirty water of the Mersey
slipping past and the Liverpool landing-stage disappearing into mist,
and felt that it was comfortless and cold, and knew they hadn't got a
father or a mother, and remembered that they were aliens, and realized
that in front of them lay a great deal of gray, uneasy, dreadfully wet
sea, endless stretches of it, days and days of it, with waves on top of
it to make them sick and submarines beneath it to kill them if they
could, and knew that they hadn't the remotest idea, not the very
remotest, what was before them when and if they did get across to the
other side, and knew that they were refugees, castaways, derelicts, two
wretched little Germans who were neither really Germans nor really
English because they so unfortunately, so complicatedly were both,--they
decided, looking very calm and determined and sitting very close
together beneath the rug their English aunt had given them to put round
their miserable alien legs, that what they really were, were Christopher
and Columbus, because they were setting out to discover a New World.

"It's very pleasant," said Anna-Rose. "It's very pleasant to go and
di