chief who ran to meet them, whooping and clamoring welcome from
afar. It was Satouriona, the savage potentate who ruled some thirty
villages around the lower St. John's and northward along the coast. With
him came two stalwart sons, and behind trooped a host of tribesmen
arrayed in smoke-tanned deerskins stained with wild devices in gaudy
colors. They crowded around the voyagers with beaming visages and yelps
of gratulation. The royal Satouriona could not contain the exuberance of
his joy, since in the person of the French commander he recognized the
brother of the Sun, descended from the skies to aid him against his
great rival, Outina.

Hard by stood the column of stone, graven with the fleur-de-lis,
planted here on the former voyage. The Indians had crowned the mystic
emblem with evergreens, and placed offerings of maize on the ground
before it; for with an affectionate and reverent wonder they had ever
remembered the steel-clad strangers whom, two summers before, John
Ribaut had led to their shores.

Five miles up the St. John's, or River of May, there stands, on the
southern bank, a hill some forty feet high, boldly thrusting itself into
the broad and lazy waters. It is now called St. John's Bluff. Thither
the Frenchmen repaired, pushed through the dense semi-tropical forest,
and climbed the steep acclivity. Thence they surveyed their Canaan.
Beneath them moved the unruffled river, gliding around the reed-grown
shores of marshy islands, the haunt of alligators, and betwixt the
bordering expanse of wide, wet meadows, studded with island-like clumps
of pine and palmetto, and bounded by the sunny verge of distant forests.
Far on their right, seen by glimpses between the shaggy cedar-boughs,
the glistening sea lay stretched along the horizon. Before, in hazy
distance, the softened green of the woodlands was veined with the mazes
of the countless interlacing streams that drain the watery region behind
St. Mary's and Fernandina. To the left, the St. John's flowed gleaming
betwixt verdant shores beyond whose portals lay the El Dorado of their
dreams. "Briefly," writes Laudonniere, "the place is so pleasant that
those which are melancholicke would be inforced to change their humour."

A fresh surprise awaited them. The allotted span of mortal life was
quadrupled in that benign climate. Laudonniere's lieutenant, Ottigny,
ranging the neighboring forest with a party of soldiers, met a troop of
Indians who invited him to th