isfortune
doth search and pursue us, even then when we thinke to be at rest!"
exclaims the unhappy Laudonniere. Amidst the light and cheer of
renovated hope, a cloud of blackest omen was gathering in the east.

At half-past eleven on the night of Tuesday, the fourth of September,
the crew of Ribaut's flag-ship, anchored on the still sea outside the
bar, saw a huge hulk, grim with the throats of cannon, drifting towards
them through the gloom; and from its stern rolled on the sluggish air
the portentous banner of Spain.

CHAPTER VII. 1565.

MENENDEZ.

The monk, the inquisitor, and the Jesuit were lords of
Spain,--sovereigns of her sovereign, for they had formed the dark and
narrow mind of that tyrannical recluse. They had formed the minds of her
people, quenched in blood every spark of rising heresy, and given over
a noble nation to a bigotry blind and inexorable as the doom of fate.
Linked with pride, ambition, avarice, every passion of a rich, strong
nature, potent for good and ill, it made the Spaniard of that day a
scourge as dire as ever fell on man.

Day was breaking on the world. Light, hope, and freedom pierced with
vitalizing ray the clouds and the miasma that hung so thick over the
prostrate Middle Age, once noble and mighty, now a foul image of decay
and death. Kindled with new life, the nations gave birth to a progeny of
heroes, and the stormy glories of the sixteenth century rose on awakened
Europe. But Spain was the citadel of darkness,--a monastic cell, an
inquisitorial dungeon, where no ray could pierce. She was the bulwark of
the Church, against whose adamantine wall the waves of innovation beat
in vain. [19] In every country of Europe the party of freedom and
reform was the national party, the party of reaction and absolutism was
the Spanish party, leaning on Spain, looking to her for help. Above all,
it was so in France; and, while within her bounds there was for a time
some semblance of peace, the national and religious rage burst forth
on a wilder theatre. Thither it is for us to follow it, where, on the
shores of Florida, the Spaniard and the Frenchman, the bigot and the
Huguenot, met in the grapple of death.

In a corridor of his palace, Philip the Second was met by a man who had
long stood waiting his approach, and who with proud reverence placed a
petition in the hand of the pale and sombre King.

The petitioner was Pedro Menendez de Aviles, one of the ablest and most
distinguished