ton, with its brick, or sober-colored
houses. At the Azores, you know, everything is bright and gay. A
salmon-pink castle stands next a square, box-like house, painted yellow;
a blue villa and a buff villa probably adjoin dainty green and lavender
cottages, and occasionally a fancy little dwelling, all towers and
balconies, will be painted cherry red. Then the mountain peaks behind
all these houses are vivid green. So William felt almost as if he were
in fairyland.

When he had been looking at these beautiful things about six weeks, he
found suddenly, one morning, that they had turned black. He could not
see a bit with his well eye! A doctor was sent for and he said: "A
perfectly dark room for you, William Prescott, for three months, and
only enough food to keep you alive!" In all the ninety-five days the
doctor kept him shut in, William was never heard to utter one word of
complaint. His cousins sat with him a good deal (thankful that he could
not see them cry), and he told them funny stories, sang songs, and paced
back and forth for exercise, with his elbows held way out at his sides
to avoid running into the furniture. He finally saw again but had to be
very careful of that one useful eye all the rest of his life. The minute
he used it too much, the blindness would come on again.

As studying law was out of the question for him, he thought he would
write histories. He had already learned a good deal about the different
countries but knew most about Spain. So he set about learning all he
could of that country as far back as the days of Christopher Columbus.
Of course, this brought in King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella (you
remember she offered to sell her jewels to help Columbus) and stories of
Peru and Mexico, so that William Prescott spent most of his life
gathering facts together about the Spanish people. And the histories of
them he wrote (eight large books) sound almost like story books; when
you read them you seem to see the banquet halls, the queens followed by
their pages and ladies-in-waiting, the priests chanting hymns in their
monasteries, and the Mexican generals in their showy uniforms.

Think how hard it was for William Prescott to make these histories. He
dared use his eye but a few hours a week. So he hired people to read to
him, to go to libraries to look at old papers and letters, and to copy
the notes he made on a queer machine. You can see this instrument that
he contrived at the Massachusetts His