eir dwellings. Mounted on the back of a
stout savage, who plunged with him through the deep marshes, and guided
him by devious pathways through the tangled thickets, he arrived at
length, and beheld a wondrous spectacle. In the lodge sat a venerable
chief, who assured him that he was the father of five successive
generations, and that he had lived two hundred and fifty years.
Opposite, sat a still more ancient veteran, the father of the first,
shrunken to a mere anatomy, and "seeming to be rather a dead carkeis
than a living body." "Also," pursues the history, "his age was so great
that the good man had lost his sight, and could not speak one onely word
but with exceeding great paine." Despite his dismal condition, the
visitor was told that he might expect to live in the course of Nature
thirty or forty years more. As the two patriarchs sat face to face, half
hidden with their streaming white hair, Ottigny and his credulous
soldiers looked from one to the other, lost in wonder and admiration.

Man and Nature alike seemed to mark the borders of the River of May as
the site of the new colony; for here, around the Indian towns, the
harvests of maize, beans, and pumpkins promised abundant food, while the
river opened a ready way to the mines of gold and silver and the stores
of barbaric wealth which glittered before the dreaming vision of the
colonists. Yet, the better to content himself and his men, Laudonniere
weighed anchor, and sailed for a time along the neighboring coasts.
Returning, confirmed in his first impression, he set forth with a party
of officers and soldiers to explore the borders of the chosen stream.
The day was hot. The sun beat fiercely on the woollen caps and heavy
doublets of the men, till at length they gained the shade of one of
those deep forests of pine where the dead and sultry air is thick with
resinous odors, and the earth, carpeted with fallen leaves, gives no
sound beneath the foot. Yet, in the stillness, deer leaped up on all
sides as they moved along. Then they emerged into sunlight. A broad
meadow, a running brook, a lofty wall of encircling forests. The men
called it the Vale of Laudonniere. The afternoon was spent, and the sun
was near its setting, when they reached the bank of the river. They
strewed the ground with boughs and leaves, and, stretched on that
sylvan couch, slept the sleep of travel-worn and weary men.

At daybreak they were roused by sound of trumpet. Men and officers
joi