famous explorer's final resting-place.

With the death of De Soto the work of the explorers was practically at
an end. To the Indians who asked what had become of the Child of the
Sun, Alvaredo answered that he had gone to heaven for a visit, but would
soon return. Then, while the Indians waited this return of the chief,
the camp was broken up and the band set out again on a westward course,
hoping to reach the Pacific coast, whose distance they did not dream.
Months more passed by in hopeless wandering, then back to the great
river they came and spent six months more in building boats, as their
last hope of escape.

On the 2d of July, 1543, the scanty remnant of the once powerful band
embarked on the waters of the great river, and for seventeen days
floated downward, while the Indians on the bank poured arrows on them
incessantly as they passed. Fifty days later a few haggard, half-naked
survivors of De Soto's great expedition landed at the Spanish settlement
of Panuco in Mexico. They had long been given up as lost, and were
received as men risen from the grave.

_THE LOST COLONY OF ROANOKE._

In the year 1584 two wandering vessels, like the caravels of Columbus a
century earlier, found themselves in the vicinity of a new land; not, as
in the case of Columbus, by seeing twigs and fruit floating on the
water, but in the more poetical way of being visited, while far at sea,
by a sweet fragrance, as of a delicious garden full of perfumed flowers.
A garden it was, planted not by the hand of man, but by that of nature,
on the North Carolinian shores. For this was the first expedition sent
out by Sir Walter Raleigh, the earliest of Englishmen to attempt to
settle the new-discovered continent, and it was at that season as truly
a land of flowers as the more southern Florida.

The ships soon reached shore at a beautiful island called by the Indians
Wocokon, where the mariners gazed with wonder and delight on the scene
that lay before them. Wild flowers, whose perfume had reached their
senses while still two days' sail from land, thickly carpeted the soil,
and grapes grew so plentifully that the ocean waves, as they broke upon
the strand, dashed their spray upon the thick-growing clusters. "The
forests formed themselves into wonderfully beautiful bowers, frequented
by multitudes of birds. It was like a Garden of Eden, and the gentle,
friendly inhabitants appeared in unison with the scene. On the island
of Roanoke