Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER THE AGONY OF SUSPENSE: SPAIN. HUELVA AND PALOS: LA KABIDA. "In Babida's monastic fane I cannot ask, and ask in vain,— The language of Castile I speak; Mid many an Arab, many a Greek, Old in the days of Charlemagne, When minstrel music wandered round, And science, waking, blessed the sound. No earthly thought has here a place, The cowl let down on every face; Yet here, in consecrated dust, Here would I sleep, if sleep I must. From Genoa when Columbus came, (At once her glory and her shame) 'Twas here he caught the holy flame; 'Twas here the generous vow he made; His banners on the altar laid. Here, tempest-worn and desolate, A Pilot, journeying thro the wild, Stopt to solicit at the gate A pittance for a child. 'Twas here, unknowing and unknown, He stood upon the threshold-stone. But hope was his—a faith sublime, That triumphs over place and time; And here, his mighty labor done And his course of glory run, Awhile as more than man he stood, So large the debt of gratitude!" —Samuel Rogers. La Eabida, an old fortress of the Moors on the border-line of their possession—the word in their language meaning frontier—and later a Franciscan monastery dedicated to the Blessed Virgin and renamed St. Mary of La Eabida, is on a promontory a short distance out of the port of Palos in the town of Huelva, and is now conserved by the Spanish government as one of its most famous monuments, and its prior, Juan Perez de Marchena, shall ever be associated with the memory of Columbus. The building was reproduced in Chicago at the World's Columbian Exposition and it was there rich in relics and mementoes of the great man. The souvenir of that display was prepared by the late William E. Curtis, and it is a condensed history of the explorer's life. The replic...