ed his fourth colony,--Bethlehem,
1503. But misfortune was closing in upon him. After more than a year of
great hardship and distress, he returned to Spain; and there he died May
20, 1506.

The body of the world-finder was buried in Valladolid, Spain, but was
several times transferred to new resting-places. It is claimed that his
dust now lies, with that of his son Diego, in a chapel of the cathedral
of Havana; but this is doubtful. We are not at all sure that the
precious relics were not retained and interred on the island of Santo
Domingo, whither they certainly were brought from Spain. At all events,
they are in the New World,--at peace at last in the lap of the America
he gave us.

Columbus was neither a perfect man nor a scoundrel,--though as each he
has been alternately pictured. He was a remarkable man, and for his day
and calling a good one. He had with the faith of genius a marvellous
energy and tenacity, and through a great stubbornness carried out an
idea which seems to us very natural, but to the world then seemed
ridiculous. As long as he remained in the profession to which he had
been reared, and in which he was probably unequalled at the time, he
made a wonderful record. But when, after half a century as a sailor, he
suddenly turned viceroy, he became the proverbial "sailor on
land,"--absolutely "lost." In his new duties he was unpractical,
headstrong, and even injurious to the colonization of the New World. It
has been a fashion to accuse the Spanish Crown of base ingratitude
toward Columbus; but this is unjust. The fault was with his own acts,
which made harsh measures by the Crown necessary and right. He was not a
good manager, nor had he the high moral principle without which no ruler
can earn honor. His failures were not from rascality but from some
weaknesses, and from a general unfitness for the new duties to which he
was too old to adapt himself.

We have many pictures of Columbus, but probably none that look like him.
There was no photography in his day, and we cannot learn that his
portrait was ever drawn from life. The pictures that have come down to
us were made, with one exception, after his death, and all from memory
or from descriptions of him. He is represented to have been tall and
imposing, with a rather stern face, gray eyes, aquiline nose, ruddy but
freckled cheeks, and gray hair, and he liked to wear the gray habit of a
Franciscan missionary. Several of his original letters remain