off
at once; he must have this, he must have that; he will take this, he
will leave that behind; or no, he will take that, and leave this behind.
He must have a mule, for his old feet will not bear him fast enough;
ex-confessors of Her Majesty, moreover, do not travel on foot; and after
more fussing and running hither and thither a mule is borrowed from one
Juan Rodriguez Cabezudo of Moguer; and with a God-speed from the group
standing round the lighted doorway, the old monk sets forth into the
night.

It is a strange thing to consider what unimportant flotsam sometimes
floats visibly upon the stream of history, while the gravest events are
sunk deep beneath its flood. We would give a king's ransom to know
events that must have taken place in any one of twenty years in the life
of Columbus, but there is no sign of them on the surface of the stream,
nor will any fishing bring them to light. Yet here, bobbing up like a
cork, comes the name of Juan Rodriguez Cabezudo of Moguer, doubtless a
good worthy soul, but, since he has been dead these four centuries and
more, of no interest or importance to any human being; yet of whose life
one trivial act, surviving the flood of time which has engulfed all else
that he thought important, falls here to be recorded: that he did,
towards midnight of a day late in December 1491 lend a mule to Friar Juan
Perez.

Of that heroic mule journey we have no record; but it brought results
enough to compensate the good Prior for all his aching bones and
rheumatic joints. He was welcomed by the Queen, who had never quite lost
her belief in Columbus, but who had hitherto deferred to the apathy of
Ferdinand and the disapproval--of her learned advisers. Now, however,
the matter was reopened. She, who sometimes listened to priests with
results other than good, heard this worthy priest to good purpose. The
feminine friends of Columbus who remembered him at Court also spoke up
for him, among them the Marquesa de Moya, with whom he had always been a
favourite; and it was decided that his request should be granted and
three vessels equipped for the expedition, "that he might go and make
discoveries and prove true the words he had spoken."--Moreover, the
machinery that had been so hard to move before, turned swiftly now.
Diego Prieto, one of the magistrates of Palos, was sent to Columbus at La
Rabida, bearing 20,000 maravedis with which he was to buy a mule and
decent clothing for himself, and