for her loveliness and
grace, a bewigged Mrs. Skewton succeeding to the dazzling vision that
swerved the calculating policy of Napoleon III. and won his callous
heart, and that still smiles upon us from the canvas of Winterhalter.

LUCY H. HOOPER.

* * * * *

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

A LOST COLONY.

Why does nobody--antiquarian, historian, or even novelist--open again
that forgotten page of history, the story of the lost colony of
Norwegians who disappeared in the fourteenth century from the shores
of Greenland? Doctor Hayes, after he came back, had a good deal to say
of them, but he did not gather all the facts, and his book, I believe,
is now out of print.

I know no mystery made of such nightmare stuff as this in history;
and mysteries are growing scarce now-a-days as eggs of the terrible
Dinornis: we cannot afford to lose one of them.

The foremost figure in the story is of course Leif _hin-hepna_ ("the
happy"). There is much to be unearthed concerning that famous pioneer
in discovery and religion, and we Americans surely ought to have
enough interest in him to do it, as Leif unearthed this continent for
us out of the hold of the sea and Demigorgon ages ago, while the dust
of which Columbus was to be made centuries later was yet blowing loose
about the streets of Genoa. Leif, besides discovering new worlds,
turned the souls of all his father's subjects from paganism to such
Christianity as the times afforded. I protest, this vigorous young
Greenlander heads the roll of unrecognized heroes in the world:
heathen and Christians have made demigods and saints out of much
flimsier stuff than he.

The colony, too, out of which he came, what a spectral shadow it is
beside the live flesh-and-blood figures of other nations! At the
banquet of the boar-eating Scottish thanes there was one empty chair,
and that was filled by a ghost. We hear of the East and West Bygds,
settlements with hundreds of farms, churches, cathedrals, monasteries,
set on the narrow rim of green coast which edges Greenland, lying
between the impenetrable wall of ice inland and the Arctic Sea
without. They had their religion, which Leif brought to them; they
were busy and prosperous; they married, traded, fought, loved and
died; and with a breath they all vanished from off the face of the
earth. There is no ghost-story like this in literature.

Where will you find, too, such a delightful flavor of ancient