Great indeed have been the changes wrought by three centuries in the world beyond the Atlantic. The difference in the manner of foundation of the English and Spanish empires in America is not more striking than the contrast offered by their progress and present condition. The English, Dutch, and other northern nations, were content to obtain a footing in the new-found lands, without attempting their conquest. Settled upon the coast, defending themselves, often with extreme difficulty, against the assaults of warlike and crafty tribes, they aimed not at the subjugation of empires, or, if visions of future dominion occasionally crossed the imagination of the more far-sighted, the means proposed were not those of armed aggression and sanguinary spoliation, but the comparatively slow and bloodless victories of civilisation. Far otherwise was it with the warlike and ambitious Spaniard of the sixteenth century, when, with a mixture of crusading zeal and freebooting greed, he shaped his caravel’s course for distant _El-Dorado_. Not with a log-house, in the wilderness was _he_ content; it suited not his lofty and chivalrous notions to clear land and plough it, and water the stubborn furrow with his forehead’s sweat. For him the bright cuirass, the charging steed, the wild encounter with tawny hosts, reminding him of the day when, after eight hundred years’ struggle, he chased the last Saracen from Iberia’s shores. For him the glittering gold mine, the rich plantation, the cringing throng of Indian serfs. One day a cavalier of fortune, with horse and arms for sole possessions, the next he sat upon the throne whence he had hurled some far-descended prince, some Inca demi-god, or feather-crowned cacique. And at the period that a few scanty bands of expatriated malefactors, and of refugees for opinion’s sake, flying from persecution to the wilderness, toiled out a scanty and laborious existence in the forests and prairies of North America, and alone represented the Anglo-Saxon race in the New World, Spain was in secure and undisturbed enjoyment of two vast and productive empires. To-day, how great the contrast! The unwieldy Spanish colonies have crumbled and fallen to pieces, the petty English settlements have grown into a flourishing and powerful nation. And we behold the descendants of the handful of exiles who first colonised “the wild New England shore,” penetrating, almost unopposed, to the heart of the country that Montezuma ruled, and Cortés was the first to conquer. CROSSING THE DESERT.