over the wild, vast world of mystery beyond the sea. A land of romance, of
adventure, of gold.

Fifty-eight years later, the Puritans landed on the sands of Massachusetts
Bay. The illusion was gone,--the _ignis-fatuus_ of adventure, the dream of
wealth. The rugged wilderness offered only a stern and hard-won
independence. In their own hearts, not in the promptings of a great leader
or the patronage of an equivocal government, their enterprise found its
birth and its achievement. They were of the boldest, the most earnest of
their sect. There were such among the French disciples of Calvin; but no
Mayflower ever sailed from a port of France. Coligny's colonists were of a
different stamp, and widely different was their fate.

An excellent seaman and stanch Protestant, John Ribaut of Dieppe,
commanded the expedition. Under him, besides sailors, were a band of
veteran soldiers, and a few young nobles. Embarked in two of those
antiquated craft whose high poops and tub-like proportions are preserved
in the old engravings of De Bry, they sailed from Havre on the eighteenth
of February, 1562. They crossed the Atlantic, and on the thirtieth of
April, in the latitude of twenty-nine and a half degrees, saw the long,
low line where the wilderness of waves met the wilderness of woods. It was
the coast of Florida. Soon they descried a jutting point, which they
called French Cape, perhaps one of the headlands of Matanzas Inlet. They
turned their prows northward, skirting the fringes of that waste of
verdure which rolled in shadowy undulation far to the unknown West.

On the next morning, the first of May, they found themselves off the mouth
of a great river. Riding at anchor on a sunny sea, they lowered their
boats, crossed the bar that obstructed the entrance, and floated on a
basin of deep and sheltered water, alive with leaping fish. Indians were