their voyage to an issue full of promise. The Indians, seated gravely
under the neighboring trees, looked on in silent respect, thinking that
they worshipped the sun. "They be all naked and of a goodly stature,
mightie, and as well shapen and proportioned of body as any people in ye
world; and the fore part of their body and armes be painted with pretie
deuised workes, of Azure, red, and blacke, so well and so properly as
the best Painter of Europe could not amende it." With their squaws and
children, they presently drew near, and, strewing the earth with laurel
boughs, sat down among the Frenchmen. Their visitors were much pleased
with them, and Ribaut gave the chief, whom he calls the king, a robe of
blue cloth, worked in yellow with the regal fleur-de-lis.

But Ribaut and his followers, just escaped from the dull prison of their
ships, were intent on admiring the wild scenes around them. Never had
they known a fairer May-day. The quaint old narrative is exuberant with
delight. The tranquil air, the warm sun, woods fresh with young verdure,
meadows bright with flowers; the palm, the cypress, the pine, the
magnolia; the grazing deer; herons, curlews, bitterns, woodcock, and
unknown water-fowl that waded in the ripple of the beach; cedars bearded
from crown to root with long, gray moss; huge oaks smothering in the
folds of enormous grapevines;--such were the objects that greeted them
in their roamings, till their new-discovered land seemed "the fairest,
fruitfullest, and pleasantest of al the world."

They found a tree covered with caterpillars, and hereupon the ancient
black-letter says: "Also there be Silke wormes in meruielous number, a
great deale fairer and better then be our silk wormes. To bee short, it
is a thing vnspeakable to consider the thinges that bee seene there, and
shalbe founde more and more in this incomperable lande." [FN#9]