But the next year Thorvald, Leif's brother, went to Vinland and spent the winter, and the following summer sailed away down the coast as far as the Carolinas, coming back, however, in the autumn to Vinland. The next summer, while coasting around Cape Cod, they saw on the sandy shore of the bay three small elevations; these proved to be three boats made of skin, with three men under each; they seized all the men but one, who ran away with his boat, and they killed all those they had taken. Immediately, from a small bay, hundreds of small skin boats were seen coming toward them all filled with these strange people. Thorvald told his men to set up their battle-shields and guard themselves as well as possible, but to fight little against them, which they did, and the Skraellings, as they called them, shot at the Norsemen for a time, but at last fled away; but they had wounded the brave Thorvald with an arrow so that he died, and his companions becoming discouraged returned the next spring to Greenland, after an absence of three years. But Vinland was now well known, and there were many voyages made there, chiefly for the timber, of which there was a great want in Greenland. The children of Erik the Red were always ready to go on these voyages, for they inherited their father's bold and roving disposition. There is one story which tells of a voyage to Vinland made by Freydis, Erik's daughter, a cruel, hard-hearted woman, who, during the voyage, killed her husband's brothers and seized the ship; but for this she was punished by Leif on her return. Then there is another story of Gudrid, a beautiful woman who had married Thorstein, Erik's youngest son, who died while getting ready to go to Vinland. Gudrid married after this a man by the name of Thorfinn, who took her to Vinland to live, and here was born their son Snorri, who was perhaps the first white child born in America. While they were in Vinland, Thorfinn and his companions had many battles with the natives, or Skraellings, and once Freydis, being with them, fought fiercely, killing many natives with her own hand. After spending three years in Vinland, Thorfinn and Gudrid went to Iceland, and remained there the rest of their lives, and the little boy, Snorri, lived and grew to manhood, and among his descendants was the great Danish sculptor, Thorwaldsen. There are many other tales of these visits of the Vikings to the New World, but they cannot be written here; but you must remember that hundreds of years before anything was known of America to the rest of Europe, the bold Norse sea-kings came here--Erik the Red, Leif the Lucky, Biarni, Thorvald, and Thorfinn--and that Greenland, Newfoundland, Cape Cod, Nova Scotia, and Rhode Island were well known to the Northmen at a time when the rest of the world had never dreamed of a country lying on the other side of the great Atlantic. CHAPTER V. COLUMBUS AND THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA.