d waiters leave. The Countess then thanked her guests for the
honor they had done her castle, and they retired with protestations of
their distinguished consideration.

It was the heroic devotion of an Indian girl that saved the life of
Captain John Smith, when the powerful King Powhatan had decreed his
death. Ill could the struggling colony spare him at that time.

When the consul shouted that the bridge was tottering, Lartius and
Herminius sought safety in flight. But Horatius strode still nearer
the foe, the single champion of his country and liberty, and dared the
ninety thousand to come on. Dead stillness fell upon the Tuscans, so
astonished were they at the audacity of the Roman. He first broke the
awful silence, so deep that his clear, strong voice could be heard by
thousands in both armies, between which rolled the Tiber, as he
denounced the baseness and perfidy of the invaders. Not until his
words were drowned by the loud crash of fiercely disrupturing timbers,
and the sullen splash of the dark river, did his enemies hurl their
showers of arrows and javelins. Then, dexterously warding off the
missiles with his shield, he plunged into the Tiber. Although stabbed
in the hip by a Tuscan spear which lamed him for life, he swam in
safety to Rome.

"It is a bad omen," said Eric the Red, when his horse slipped and fell
on the way to his ship, moored on the coast of Greenland, in readiness
for a voyage of discovery. "Ill-fortune would be mine should I dare
venture now upon the sea." So he returned to his house, but his young
son Leif decided to go, and, with a crew of thirty-five men, sailed
southward in search of the unknown shore upon which Captain Biarni had
been driven by a storm, while sailing in another Viking ship two or
three years before. The first land that they saw was probably
Labrador, a barren, rugged plain. Leif called this country Heluland,
or the land of flat stones. Sailing onward many days, he came to a
low, level coast thickly covered with woods, on account of which he
called the country Markland, probably the modern Nova Scotia. Sailing
onward, they came to an island which they named Vinland on account of
the abundance of delicious wild grapes in the woods. This was in the
year 1000. Here where the city of Newport, R. I., stands, they spent
many months, and then returned to Greenland with their vessel loaded
with grapes and strange kinds of wood. The voyage was successful, and
n