He showed some of the treasures he had brought, and spoke with certainty of the discoveries which had been made, as only precursors of those yet to come.

When his short narrative was ended, all the company knelt and united in chanting the "Te Deum," "We Praise Thee, O God." Las Casas, describing the joy and hope of that occasion says, "it seems as if they had a foretaste of the joys of paradise." It would seem as if those whose duty it is to prepare fit celebrations of the periods of the great discovery, could hardly do better than to produce on the twenty-fourth of April, 1893, a reproduction of the solemn pageant in which, in Barcelona, four centuries before, the Spanish court commemorated the great discovery.
From this time, for several weeks, a series of pageants and festivities surrounded him.

At no other period of his life were such honors paid to him.

It was at one of the banquets, at which he was present, that the incident of the egg, so often told in connection with the great discovery, took place.

A flippant courtier--of that large class of people who stay at home when great deeds are done, and afterwards depreciate the doers of them--had the impertinence to ask Columbus, if the adventure so much praised was not, after all, a very simple matter.
He probably said "a short voyage of four or five weeks; was it anything more ?" Columbus replied by giving him an egg which was on the table, and asking him if he could stand it on one end.