I have ever seen, is only approached by the one spring near Fort Fanning, in Florida, upon which so much inquiry has been expended. I would myself pronounce it the famous fountain of health for which De Leon sought so long, were it not that every human being who drinks of its transparent waters, unless craftily qualified, dies with that most loathsome of all diseases, the ague and fever. The first white man who ever trod in the valleys of the Ozark was the famous Fernando de Soto. About the year 1539 or 1540, this gallant soldier, capitan-general of Florida, and a marquis, made a voyage to his commandery, for the purpose of conquering it. Sailing from Havana he landed at the bay of the Holy Spirit, now called Tampa, Hillsborough, Honda, etc., and occupied an Indian village not far from the mouth of the Manittee River, and just opposite the present post of Fort Brooke. The old ruins are still visible there, and the trace of an aqueduct or canal which appears at some distant day to have connected the waters of the great interior lakes with the gulf. People say the ruins are the remnant of an old Spanish fort; but half a glance will satisfy any one that all the Spanish troops ever in North America could not have constructed that aqueduct, which to all appearance is old as the city of Seville. The ruins belonged evidently to some older race, and are very curious though they have nothing to do with De Soto. De Soto marched through Florida across the country of Apalache Indians, with whom he had a fight, across the Mississippi toward Mexico. De Soto, first of Europeans, saw the Mississippi, and crossed it somewhere near Memphis, if the account given by old Biedma, his historian, of topography be true. Thence he now passed through the now State of Arkansas, crossing the Ozark Ridge, passing over the Red River, and marching along the false Wachita until he came to the famous Rio Grande, since famous for the battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, and celebrated by the Mexican poet,[1] Ho Axe de Saltillo. De Soto did not reach New Spain, but was forced to retrace his steps, died, and was thrown by his soldiers into the Mississippi, to prevent the natives from mutilating his remains. It was a fitting tomb for so great a man. Any one who wishes to read all the items of this great march may find them in old Biedma’s strange book, in the _vidas de los Conquistadores_, or as those books are somewhat rare, in the Compendium of Discoveries until 1573, by Conway Robinson, Esq., of Richmond, Va., a person who devotes himself for amusement and relaxation to digging out the gems of strange old books most persons would think it hard work to read.