ache, which last reason was her excuse for not seeing company.

He called again, the following day, and learned that Miss Hazard had
just left the city, and gone on a visit to Oxbow Village.

PROPHETIC VOICES ABOUT AMERICA: A MONOGRAPH.

The discovery of America by Christopher Columbus is the greatest event
of all secular history. Besides the potato, the turkey, and maize, which
it introduced at once for the nourishment and comfort of the Old World,
this discovery opened the door to influences infinite in extent and
beneficence. Measure them, describe them, picture them, you cannot.
While this continent was unknown, imagination invested it with
proverbial magnificence. It was the Orient. When afterwards it took its
place in geography, imagination found another field in trying to portray
its future history. If the Golden Age is before, and not behind, as is
now happily the prevailing faith, then indeed must America share at
least, if it does not monopolize, the promised good.

Before the voyage of Columbus in 1492, nothing of America was really
known. A few scraps from antiquity, a few rumors from the ocean, and a
few speculations from science, were all that the inspired navigator
found to guide him. Foremost among all these were the well-known verses
of the Spaniard Seneca, in the chorus of his "Medea," which for
generations had been the finger-point to an undiscovered world.

"Venient annis saecula seris
Quibus Oceanus vincula rerum
Laxet, et ingens pateat tellus,
Tethysque novos detegat orbes;
Nec sit terris ultima Thule."[1]

"In tardy years the epoch will come in which the ocean will unloose the
bonds of nature, and the great earth will stretch out, and the sea will
disclose new worlds; nor will Thule be the most remote on the globe."

Two, if not more, different copies of these verses are extant in the
handwriting of Columbus,--precious autographs; one in the sketch of his
work on the Prophecies, another in a letter addressed to Queen Isabella;
and it would seem as if there was still a third entered among his
observations of lunar eclipses at Hayti and Jamaica. By these verses the
great discoverer sailed. But Humboldt, who has illustrated the
enterprise with all that classical or mediaeval literature affords,[2]
does not hesitate to declare his conviction, that the discovery of a new
continent was more completely foreshadowed in the simple geographical
statement of the Greek Stra