On the 2d of July, 1543, the scanty remnant of the once powerful band embarked on the waters of the great river, and for seventeen days floated downward, while the Indians on the bank poured arrows on them incessantly as they passed. Fifty days later a few haggard, half-naked survivors of De Soto's great expedition landed at the Spanish settlement of Panuco in Mexico. They had long been given up as lost, and were received as men risen from the grave. _THE LOST COLONY OF ROANOKE._ In the year 1584 two wandering vessels, like the caravels of Columbus a century earlier, found themselves in the vicinity of a new land; not, as in the case of Columbus, by seeing twigs and fruit floating on the water, but in the more poetical way of being visited, while far at sea, by a sweet fragrance, as of a delicious garden full of perfumed flowers. A garden it was, planted not by the hand of man, but by that of nature, on the North Carolinian shores. For this was the first expedition sent out by Sir Walter Raleigh, the earliest of Englishmen to attempt to settle the new-discovered continent, and it was at that season as truly a land of flowers as the more southern Florida. The ships soon reached shore at a beautiful island called by the Indians Wocokon, where the mariners gazed with wonder and delight on the scene that lay before them. Wild flowers, whose perfume had reached their senses while still two days' sail from land, thickly carpeted the soil, and grapes grew so plentifully that the ocean waves, as they broke upon the strand, dashed their spray upon the thick-growing clusters. "The forests formed themselves into wonderfully beautiful bowers, frequented by multitudes of birds. It was like a Garden of Eden, and the gentle, friendly inhabitants appeared in unison with the scene. On the island of Roanoke they were received by the wife of the king, and entertained with Arcadian hospitality." When these vessels returned to England and the mariners told of what they had seen, the people were filled with enthusiasm. Queen Elizabeth was so delighted with what was said of the beauty of the country that she gave it the name of Virginia, in honor of herself as a virgin queen. The next year a larger expedition was sent out, carrying one hundred and fifty colonists, who were to form the vanguard of the British dominion in the New World. They found the land all they had been told. Ralph Lane, the governor, wrote home: "It is the goodliest soil under the cope of heaven; the most pleasing territory in the world; the continent is of a huge and unknown greatness, and very well peopled and towned, though savagely. The climate is so wholesome that we have none sick. If Virginia had but horses and kine, and were inhabited by Englishmen, no realm in Christendom were comparable with it."