r of their character, he has but added
his own personality. However far back we go in his ancestry, there is
something of him to be traced, could we but trace it; and although it
soon becomes so widely scattered that no separate fraction of it seems to
be recognisable, we know that, generations back, we may come upon some
sympathetic fact, some reservoir of the essence that was him, in which we
can find the source of many of his actions, and the clue, perhaps, to his
character.

In the case of Columbus we are spared this dilemma. The past is reticent
enough about the man himself; and about his ancestors it is almost
silent. We know that he had a father and grandfather, as all grandsons
of Adam have had; but we can be certain of very little more than that.
He came of a race of Italian yeomen inhabiting the Apennine valleys; and
in the vale of Fontanabuona, that runs up into the hills behind Genoa,
the two streams of family from which he sprang were united. His father
from one hamlet, his mother from another; the towering hills behind, the
Mediterranean shining in front; love and marriage in the valley; and a
little boy to come of it whose doings were to shake the world.

His family tree begins for us with his grandfather, Giovanni Colombo of
Terra-Rossa, one of the hamlets in the valley--concerning whom many human
facts may be inferred, but only three are certainly known; that he lived,
begot children, and died. Lived, first at Terra Rossa, and afterwards
upon the sea-shore at Quinto; begot children in number three--Antonio,
Battestina, and Domenico, the father of our Christopher; and died,
because one of the two facts in his history is that in the year 1444 he
was not alive, being referred to in a legal document as quondam, or, as
we should say, "the late." Of his wife, Christopher's grandmother, since
she never bought or sold or witnessed anything requiring the record of
legal document, history speaks no word; although doubtless some pleasant
and picturesque old lady, or lady other than pleasant and picturesque,
had place in the experience or imagination of young Christopher. Of the
pair, old Quondam Giovanni alone survives the obliterating drift of
generations, which the shores and brown slopes of Quinto al Mare, where
he sat in the sun and looked about him, have also survived. Doubtless
old Quondam could have told us many things about Domenico, and his
over-sanguine buyings and sellings; have perhaps told us