they were received by the wife of the king, and entertained
with Arcadian hospitality."

When these vessels returned to England and the mariners told of what
they had seen, the people were filled with enthusiasm. Queen Elizabeth
was so delighted with what was said of the beauty of the country that
she gave it the name of Virginia, in honor of herself as a virgin queen.
The next year a larger expedition was sent out, carrying one hundred and
fifty colonists, who were to form the vanguard of the British dominion
in the New World.

They found the land all they had been told. Ralph Lane, the governor,
wrote home: "It is the goodliest soil under the cope of heaven; the most
pleasing territory in the world; the continent is of a huge and unknown
greatness, and very well peopled and towned, though savagely. The
climate is so wholesome that we have none sick. If Virginia had but
horses and kine, and were inhabited by Englishmen, no realm in
Christendom were comparable with it."

But they did not find the natives so kindly disposed as in the year
before, and no wonder; for the first thing the English did after landing
on Roanoke Island was to accuse the Indians of stealing a silver cup,
for which they took revenge by burning a village and destroying the
standing corn. Whether this method was copied from the Spaniards or not,
it proved a most unwise one, for at once the colonists found themselves
surrounded by warlike foes, instead of in intercourse with confiding
friends.

The English colonists had the same fault as those of Spain. The stories
of the wonderful wealth of Mexico and Peru had spread far and wide over
Europe, and the thirst for gold was in all hearts. Instead of planting
grain and building homes, the new-comers sought the yellow evil far and
wide, almost as if they expected the soil to be paved with it. The
Indians were eagerly questioned and their wildest stories believed. As
the natives of Porto Rico had invented a magic fountain to rid
themselves of Ponce de Leon and his countrymen, so those of Roanoke told
marvellous fables to lure away the unwelcome English. The Roanoke River,
they said, gushed forth from a rock so near the western ocean that in
storms the salt sea-water was hurled into the fresh-water stream. Far
away on its banks there dwelt a nation rich in gold, and inhabiting a
city the walls of which glittered with precious pearls.

Lane himself, whom we may trust to have been an educated man, accept