ry pencil, the spring beauty, the dog-tooth
violet, and the true violet. In clouds and fog, and rain and snow,
and all discouragement, Nature pushes on her forces with progressive
haste and rapidity. Before one is aware, all the lawns and meadows
are deeply green, the trees are opening their tender leaves. In a
burst of sunshine the cherry-trees are white, the Judas-tree is pink,
the hawthorns give a sweet smell. The air is full of sweetness; the
world, of color.

In the midst of a chilling northeast storm the ground is strewed with
the white-and-pink blossoms from the apple-trees. The next day the
mercury stands at eighty degrees. Summer has come.

There was no Spring.

The winter is over. You think so? Robespierre thought the
Revolution was over in the beginning of his last Thermidor. He lost
his head after that.

When the first buds are set, and the corn is up, and the cucumbers
have four leaves, a malicious frost steals down from the north and
kills them in a night.

That is the last effort of spring. The mercury then mounts to ninety
degrees. The season has been long, but, on the whole, successful.
Many people survive it.

CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH

By Charles Dudley Warner

PREFACE

When I consented to prepare this volume for a series, which should
deal with the notables of American history with some familiarity and
disregard of historic gravity, I did not anticipate the seriousness
of the task. But investigation of the subject showed me that while
Captain John Smith would lend himself easily enough to the purely
facetious treatment, there were historic problems worthy of a
different handling, and that if the life of Smith was to be written,
an effort should be made to state the truth, and to disentangle the
career of the adventurer from the fables and misrepresentations that
have clustered about it.

The extant biographies of Smith, and the portions of the history of
Virginia that relate to him, all follow his own narrative, and accept
his estimate of himself, and are little more than paraphrases of his
story as told by himself. But within the last twenty years some new
contemporary evidence has come to light, and special scholars have
expended much critical research upon different portions of his
career. The result of this modern investigation has been to
discredit much of the romance gathered about Smith and Pocahontas,
and a good deal to reduce his heroic proportions. A vague report of
-