The letter has its practical side; the requisitions are made with good sense and a grasp of the economic situation; but they have a deeper significance than that.

All this talk about little ewe lambs, wine and bacon (better than the last lot, if it please your Highnesses), little yearling calves, and fifty casks of molasses that can be bought a ducat or two cheaper in Madeira in the months of April and May than at any other time or place, is only half real.

Columbus fills his Sovereigns' ears with this clamour so that he shall not hear those embarrassing questions that will inevitably be asked about the gold and the spices.

He boldly begins his letter with the old story about "indications of spices" and gold "in incredible quantities," with a great deal of "moreover" and "besides," and a bold, pompous, pathetic "I will undertake"; and then he gets away from that subject by wordy deviations, so that to one reading his letter it really might seem as though the true business of the expedition was to provide Coronel, Mosen Pedro, Gaspar, Beltran, Gil Garcia, and the rest of them with work and wages.

Everything that occurs to him, great or little, that makes it seem as though things were humming in the new settlement, he stuffs into this document, shovelling words into the empty hulls of the ships, and trying to fill those bottomless pits with a stream of talk.