The explorers found themselves on the edge of a vast forest of oak, hemlock, maple, and pine; but they saw no sassafras-trees to speak of, nor did they encounter--what would have been infinitely less to their taste--and red-men. Here and there were discoverable the scattered ashes of fires where the Indians had encamped earlier in the spring; they were absent now, at the silvery falls, higher up the stream, where fish abounded at that season. The soft June breeze, laden with the delicate breath of wild-flowers and the pungent odors of spruce and pine, ruffled the duplicate sky in the water; the new leaves lisped pleasantly in the tree tops, and the birds were singing as if they had gone mad. No ruder sound or movement of life disturbed the primeval solitude. Master Pring would scarcely recognize the spot were he to land there to-day. Eleven years afterwards a much cleverer man than the commander of the Speedwell dropped anchor in the Piscataqua--Captain John Smith of famous memory. After slaying Turks in hand-to-hand combats, and doing all sorts of doughty deeds wherever he chanced to decorate the globe with his presence, he had come with two vessels to the fisheries on the rocky selvage of Maine, when curiosity, or perhaps a deeper motive, led him to examine the neighboring shore lines. With eight of his men in a small boat, a ship’s yawl, he skirted the coast from Penobscot Bay to Cape Cod, keeping his eye open. This keeping his eye open was a peculiarity of the little captain; possibly a family trait. It was Smith who really discovered the Isles of Shoals, exploring in person those masses of bleached rock--those “isles assez hautes,” of which the French navigator Pierre de Guast, Sieur de Monts, had caught a bird’s-eye glimpse through the twilight in 1605. Captain Smith christened the group Smith’s Isles, a title which posterity, with singular persistence of ingratitude, has ignored. It was a tardy sense of justice that expressed itself a few years ago in erecting on Star Island a simple marble shaft to the memory of JOHN SMITH--the multitudinous! Perhaps this long delay is explained by a natural hesitation to label a monument so ambiguously. The modern Jason, meanwhile, was not without honor in his own country, whatever may have happened to him in his own house, for the poet George Wither addressed a copy of pompous verses “To his Friend Captain Smith, upon his Description of New England.” “Sir,” he says-- “Sir: your Relations I haue read: which shew Ther’s reason I should honor them and you: And if their meaning I have vnderstood, I dare to censure thus: Your Project’s good; And may (if follow’d) doubtlesse quit the paine With honour, pleasure and a trebble gaine; Beside the benefit that shall arise To make more happy our Posterities.”