g signed this Bull, considers it
further-assisted, no doubt, by the Portuguese Ambassador at the Vatican,
to whom it has been shown; realises that in the wording of the Bull an
injustice has been done to Portugal, since Spain is allowed to fix very
much at her own convenience the point at which the line drawn from pole
to pole shall cut the equator; and also because, although Spain is given
all the lands in existence within her territory, Portugal is only given
the lands which she may actually have occupied. Even the legal mind of
the Pope, although much drowsed and blunted by brutish excesses,
discerns faultiness in this document; and consequently on the same day
issues a third Bull, in which the injustice to Portugal is redressed.
Nothing so easy, thinks the Pope, as to issue Bulls; if you make a
mistake in one Bull, issue another; and, having issued three Bulls in
twenty-four hours, he desists for the present, having divided the
earthly globe.

Thus easy it is for a Pope to draw lines from pole to pole, and across
the deep of the sea. Yet the poles sleep still in their icy virginal
sanctity, and the blue waves through which that papal line passes shift
and shimmer and roll in their free salt loneliness, unaffected by his
demarcation; the heathen also, it appears, since that distant day, have
had something to say to their disposition. If he had slept upon it
another night, poor Pope, it might have occurred to him that west and
east might meet on a meridian situated elsewhere on the globe than one
hundred miles west of the Azores; and that the Portuguese, who for the
moment had nothing heathen except Africa left to them, might according to
his demarcation strike a still richer vein of heathendom than that
granted to Spain. But the holy Pontiff, bull neck, low forehead,
impudent prominent nose, and sensual lips notwithstanding, is exhausted
by his cosmographical efforts, and he lets it rest at that. Later, when
Spain discovers that her privileges have been abated, he will have to
issue another Bull; but not to-day. Sufficient unto the day are the
Bulls thereof. For the moment King proposes and Pope disposes; but the
matter lies ultimately in the hands of the two eternal protagonists, man
and God.

In the meantime here are six heathen alive and well, or at any rate well
enough to support, willy-nilly, the rite of holy baptism. They must have
been sufficiently dazed and bewildered by all that had happened to th