ld
lose heart and hope in the roofless waste, with never a stone or tree,
nor any shadow save a cloud's, and turn back dismayed; but Serapion
replied: "To me it appears, your Discretion, that so bold a mariner, if
years failed him not, might win to the Earthly Paradise."

"So have I heard," said the Bishop. "Yet here would you be sailing
into the west, and for a certainty the Paradise of God was in the east.
How would you give a reasonable account of this?"

But we could make no reply, for we knew not; nor Serapion more than we.

"Now, watching the sea," said the Bishop, "you have marked the ships,
how they go. When they come to you, they first show the mast-top, then
the sail, and last the body of the ship, and perchance the sweep of the
oars, reverse-wise when they depart from you, you first fail to see the
body of the ship, and then the sail, but longest you hold in sight the
mast-top, or it may be a bright streamer flying therefrom, or a cross
glittering in the light--though these be but small things compared with
the body of the ship. Is it not so?"

We answered, readily enough, that so it was.

"Is it not then even as though one were to watch a wayfarer on
horse-back, going or coming over the green bulge of a low hill? Were
he coming to you, you would first see the head of the rider, and last
the legs of the horse, and were he riding away the horse would first go
down over the hill, but still, for a little, you would see the man
waving his hand in farewell as he sank lower and lower."

Such indeed, we said, was the fashion of a ship's coming and going.

"Does it not then seem a likely thing," said his Discretion, "that the
sea is in the nature of a long low hill, down which the ships go? So
have I heard it surmised by wise men, sages and scholars of the lights
of heaven, in the cities of Greece and Egypt. For the earth and the
ocean-sea, they teach, is fashioned as a vast globe in the heights of
heaven. And truly, if indeed it be the shadow of the world which
darkens the face of the moon in time of eclipse, the earth may well be
round, for that shadow is round. Thus, then, one holding ever a
westward course might sail down the bulge of the sea, and under the
world, and round about even unto the east, if there be sea-way all
along that course."

Silently we listened to so strange a matter, but the Bishop traced for
us on the sand a figure of the earth. "And here," said he, "is this
land of ours, a