PAGE LANDING OF THE PILGRIM FATHERS _frontispiece_ PORTRAIT OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS _to face_ 2 POCAHONTAS INTERCEDING FOR JOHN SMITH „ 47 FIRST MEETING OF THE ASSEMBLY IN VIRGINIA „ 60 ROGER WILLIAMS’ DEPARTURE FROM SALEM „ 124 JOHN ELIOT PREACHING TO THE INDIANS „ 159 BAXTER PRESENTING THE CHARTER OF RHODE ISLAND „ 191 EJECTMENT OF THE SHERIFF BY THE PEOPLE OF NEW HAMPSHIRE „ 210 BACON ADDRESSING THE COUNCIL „ 245 RECEPTION OF PENN „ 282 PENN AND THE INDIANS „ 284 PENN’S DEPARTURE „ 288 WHITFIELD PREACHING „ 396 A POPULAR HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. CHAPTER I. DISCOVERIES. The mighty hemisphere of the West lay for countless ages shrouded from the knowledge of the rest of the world, as by the darkness of night, waiting for the appointed time of its revelation. That appointed time was the close of the fifteenth century, for although upwards of four hundred years earlier, after the reign of Alfred of England, and Charlemagne in France, America was discovered by some of those adventurous Scandinavian Vikings—the true ancestors of the so-called Anglo-Saxons, who, in their stout-built little ships, traversed all seas—still the knowledge of this discovery produced so little effect on the rest of the world, that afterwards, when America was rediscovered, the history of the Scandinavian colonisers was regarded as mythical. The antiquarian researches, however, of Rafn and others, leave no doubt of the fact. These bold adventurers, at home on the most perilous seas, having colonised Iceland, Greenland, and afterwards Newfoundland or Nova Scotia, came at length, in the year 1000, to the coast of America, where a colony was formed under the name of _Vinland hin Goda_, or Vineland the Good—so called from the abundance of wild grapes which grew there, and because the mildness of the climate and the fertility of the soil delighted the discoverers, accustomed as they were to the savage sterility and severe cold of Greenland and Iceland, and even of their native north.