top and look at it; and presently you become conscious of a
difference between it and all the other houses. They are all alert,
busy, noisy, crowded with life in every storey, oozing vitality from
every window; but of all the narrow vertical strips that make up the
houses of the street, this strip numbered thirty-seven is empty, silent,
and dead. The shutters veil its windows; within it is dark, empty of
furniture, and inhabited only by a memory and a spirit. It is a strange
place in which to stand and to think of all that has happened since the
man of our thoughts looked forth from these windows, a common little boy.
The world is very much alive in the Vico Dritto di Ponticello; the little
freshet of life that flows there flows loud and incessant; and yet into
what oceans of death and silence has it not poured since it carried forth
Christopher on its stream! One thinks of the continent of that New World
that he discovered, and all the teeming millions of human lives that have
sprung up and died down, and sprung up again, and spread and increased
there; all the ploughs that have driven into its soil, the harvests that
have ripened, the waving acres and miles of grain that have answered the
call of Spring and Autumn since first the bow of his boat grated on the
shore of Guanahani. And yet of the two scenes this narrow shuttered
house in a bye-street of Genoa is at once the more wonderful and more
credible; for it contains the elements of the other. Walls and floors
and a roof, a place to eat and sleep in, a place to work and found a
family, and give tangible environment to a human soul--there is all human
enterprise and discovery, effort, adventure, and life in that.

If Christopher wanted to go down to the sea he would have to pass under
the Gate of St. Andrew, with the old prison, now pulled down to make room
for the modern buildings, on his right, and go down the Salita del
Prione, which is a continuation of the Vico Dritto di Ponticello. It
slopes downwards from the Gate as the first street sloped upwards to it;
and it contains the same assortment of shops and of houses, the same
mixture of handicrafts and industries, as were seen in the Vico Dritto di
Ponticello. Presently he would come to the Piazza dell' Erbe, where
there is no grass, but only a pleasant circle of little houses and shops,
with already a smack of the sea in them, chiefly suggested by the shops
of instrument-makers, where to-day there are c