Every once in a while some one who thinks he knows more than others says the end of the world is not far off, but we may be quite sure that the world will keep on going and that it will keep on going long after we have all grown up and died and our children have done the same. At this time, when people were looking for the end of the world there was in the north of Europe a tribe of Teutons who were not Christians and knew and cared nothing about what the Bible said as to the end of the world. They belonged to the same family as the Danes who had come to England in the time of King Alfred. They were called Norsemen or Vikings. They were bold seafaring men, even more hardy and unafraid than the Phenician sailors of old. Their boats were painted black and had prows carved with figures of sea-monsters or dragons. They sailed the northern seas and went farther westward toward the setting sun than any sailors had ever gone. They had discovered Iceland and Greenland, and at last under their chief who was named Leif Ericson they reached the shores of America. So about the same year that the Christians in Europe were expecting the end of the world--the Year 1000--the Vikings had gone to what they thought was “the end of the world.” They called the new country Vineland or Wineland, because they found grapes, from which wine is made, growing there. They did not go far on shore, however, and they thought this new land was only another small island. They had no idea it was a new world. But it was too far away from their own country, and they found wild savages there who made it so uncomfortable for them that they sailed back home leaving the country for good. The Vikings did nothing more about their discovery, and people forgot all about this new country until nearly five hundred years later. 48 Real Castles You may think that castles belong only in fairy-tales of princes and princesses. But about the Year 1000 there were castles almost everywhere over Europe, and they were not fairy-castles but real ones with real people in them. After the downfall of Rome in 476, the Roman Empire was broken to pieces like a cut-up puzzle-map, and people built castles on the pieces, and they kept on building castles up to the fourteen hundreds. And this is why and how people built them and why they at last stopped building them.