ing each other into the surf. The Spaniards, bloated with fine
living upon the fruits of the miraculous land, fell in heaps; but the
hardy Englishmen, tawny with sea-voyaging, hairy for lack of razors,
with muscles like wire, fangs greedy for flesh, and fingers itching for
gold, despatched the wounded, drove the dying into the sea, and soon
reduced the natives to a state of superstitious wonderment. Here a
settlement was made; women were imported; children grew. All seemed to
favour the expansion of the British Empire, and had there been men
like Richard Dalloway in the time of Charles the First, the map would
undoubtedly be red where it is now an odious green. But it must be
supposed that the political mind of that age lacked imagination, and,
merely for want of a few thousand pounds and a few thousand men, the
spark died that should have been a conflagration. From the interior came
Indians with subtle poisons, naked bodies, and painted idols; from the
sea came vengeful Spaniards and rapacious Portuguese; exposed to all
these enemies (though the climate proved wonderfully kind and the earth
abundant) the English dwindled away and all but disappeared. Somewhere
about the middle of the seventeenth century a single sloop watched its
season and slipped out by night, bearing within it all that was left of
the great British colony, a few men, a few women, and perhaps a dozen
dusky children. English history then denies all knowledge of the place.
Owing to one cause and another civilisation shifted its centre to a spot
some four or five hundred miles to the south, and to-day Santa Marina is
not much larger than it was three hundred years ago. In population it is
a happy compromise, for Portuguese fathers wed Indian mothers, and their
children intermarry with the Spanish. Although they get their ploughs
from Manchester, they make their coats from their own sheep, their silk
from their own worms, and their furniture from their own cedar trees,
so that in arts and industries the place is still much where it was in
Elizabethan days.

The reasons which had drawn the English across the sea to found a small
colony within the last ten years are not so easily described, and will
never perhaps be recorded in history books. Granted facility of
travel, peace, good trade, and so on, there was besides a kind of
dissatisfaction among the English with the older countries and the
enormous accumulations of carved stone, stained glass, and rich b