terrible winter. Popham died, and Raleigh
Gilbert succeeded him as governor. When spring came all the survivors of
the colony sailed home in the pinnace they had built and the enterprise
was abandoned. The reports of the colonists, after their winter in
Maine, were to the effect that the second or northern colony was 'not
habitable for Englishmen.'

In the meantime the permanent foundation of the first or southern
colony, the real Virginia, was well under way. The same number of
intending emigrants went out, a hundred and twenty. On the 26th of
April, 1607, 'about four a-clocke in the morning, wee descried the Land
of Virginia: the same day wee entered into the Bay of Chesupioc'
[Chesapeake]. Thus begins the tale of Captain John Smith, of the
founding of Jamestown, and of a permanent Virginia, the first of the
future United States.

Now that we have seen one spot in vast America really become the promise
of the 'Inglishe nation' which Raleigh had longed for, we must return
once more to Raleigh himself as, mocked by his tantalizing vision, he
looked out on a changing world from his secular Mount Pisgah in the
prison Tower of London.

By this time he had felt both extremes of fortune to the full. During
the travesty of justice at his trial the attorney-general, having no
sound argument, covered him with slanderous abuse. These are three of
the false accusations on which he was condemned to death: 'Viperous
traitor,' 'damnable atheist,' and 'spider of hell.' Hawkins, Drake,
Frobisher, and Grenville, all were dead. So Raleigh, last of the great
Elizabethan lions, was caged and baited for the sport of Spain.

Six of his twelve years of imprisonment were lightened by the
companionship of his wife, Elizabeth Throgmorton, most beautiful of all
the late Queen's maids of honor. Another solace was the _History of the
World_, the writing of which set his mind free to wander forth at will
although his body stayed behind the bars. But the contrast was too
poignant not to wring this cry of anguish from his preface: 'Yet when we
once come in sight of the Port of death, to which all winds drive us,
and when by letting fall that fatal Anchor, which can never be weighed
again, the navigation of this life takes end: Then it is, I say, that
our own cogitations (those sad and severe cogitations, formerly beaten
from us by our health and felicity) return again, and pay us to the
uttermost for all the pleasing passages of our life past.'