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Here again we do not know what happened; the only proof we have that he made the journey at all is a memorandum written by him in his copy of the "Imago Mundi." It is dated Lisbon, December, 1488, and states that Bartholomew Dias had just rounded southern Africa the Cape of Good Hope. Whether Columbus made another fruitless appeal to Portugal we shall never know.

Moreover, he is an Indian and one of the Maya tribe that at one time were a noble people and notable good fighters, but now slaves, alas, all save a sorry few that do live out of the white man's reach 'mid the ruin of noble cities high up in the Cordilleras sic transit gloria mundi, alas!"

"And this was the famous hundred-thousand-dollar harp of Sara, his daughter, that the papers used to talk so much about, you remember?" asked the girl, stirring with her foot a few mournful bits of rubbish that lay near the piano. "Sic transit gloria mundi!" growled Stern, shaking his head. "You and she were the same age, almost. And now "

To obtain that distance and the use of new weapons it required the prestige with which the Marquis suddenly clothed himself in the eyes of Gorka's seconds by pronouncing the name, still legendary in the provinces and to the foreigner, of Gramont-Caderousse 'Sic transit gloria mundi'! On leaving that rendezvous the excellent man really had tears in his eyes.

But without Jupiter, god of the heaven both for Greeks and Romans, and now too in the eyes of both peoples the god who watched over the destiny of the Roman Empire, this wonderful feat could not have been performed. The identification of the heaven-god with the animus mundi of the Stoics was not indeed a new idea; it may be traced up Stoic channels even to Plato.

It is doubtless the red Rose of ancient writers, but at present the flowers may be red, crimson, or white, and there are varieties of all intermediate shades. Several variegated or striped Roses belong here, including Gloria Mundi, a popular favourite often but erroneously grown under the name of York and Lancaster.

There are numerous figures of towns, animals, birds, and fish, with grotesque customs, such as the mediæval geographers believed to exist in different parts of the world; Babylon with its famous tower; Rome, the capital of the world, bearing the inscription’Roma, caput mundi, tenet orbis frena rotundi’; and Troy as ’civitas bellicosissima.’ In Great Britain most of the cathedrals are mentioned; but of Ireland the author seems to have known very little.

Finally, of course, there is that vague body, the Di Manes, 'the good gods, the principal deities of the world of the dead; to them invocations are addressed, and they have their place in the formulæ of the parentalia and the opening of the mundi. In connection with them, acting as a link with the female deities, we have the strange goddess Genita Mana, the 'spirit of birth and death.

There was something in the child's eyes that in some strange fashion recalled the eyes of Rosa Mundi. So might she once have gazed in innocence upon a world unknown. Again, almost savagely, he strove to thrust away the thoughts that troubled him. The child was bound to be contaminated sooner or later; but what was that to him? It was out of his power to deliver her.

She was buried in the nunrie of Goodstow beside Oxford, with these verses vpon hir toome: Hîc iacet in tumulo, Rosa mundi non Rosa munda, Non redolet sed olet, quæ redolere solet. The meaning whereof may be found in Graftons large chronicle, page 77. in an English septenarie. Moreouer, king Henrie was noted not to be so fauourable to the liberties & fréedoms of the church as he might haue béene.