One of the most important of the prisoners was William Drummond, a close friend of Bacon. Berkeley hated him and greeted him with the most stinging insult he could think of. "Mr. Drummond," said he, with a bitter sneer, "you are very welcome; I am more glad to see you than any man in Virginia. Mr. Drummond, you shall be hanged in half an hour." And he was. His property was also seized, but when the king heard of this he ordered it to be restored to his widow. "God has been inexpressibly merciful to this poor province," wrote Berkeley, with sickening hypocrisy, after one of his hangings. Charles II., the king, took a different view of the matter, saying: "That old fool has hung more men in that naked province than I did for the murder of my father." More than twenty of Bacon's chief supporters were hung, and the governor's revenge came to an end only when the assembly met and insisted that these executions should cease. We have told how Bacon came to his end. We must do the same for Berkeley, his foe. Finding that he was hated and despised in Virginia, he sailed for England, many of the people celebrating his departure by firing cannon and illuminating their houses. He never returned. The king was so angry with him that he refused to see him; a slight which affected the old man so severely that he soon died, of a broken heart, it is said. Thus ended the first rebellion of the people of the American colonies. _CHEVALIER LA SALLE, THE EXPLORER OF THE MISSISSIPPI._ There are two great explorers whose names have been made famous by their association with the mighty river of the West, the Mississippi, or Father of Waters,--De Soto, the discoverer, and La Salle, the explorer, of that stupendous stream. Among all the rivers of the earth the Mississippi ranks first. It has its rivals in length and volume, but stands without a rival as a noble channel of commerce, the pride of the West and the glory of the South. We have told the story of its discovery by De Soto, the Spanish adventurer; we have now to tell that of its exploration by La Salle, the French chevalier. Let us say here that though the honor of exploring the Mississippi has been given to La Salle, he was not the first to traverse its waters. The followers of De Soto descended the stream from the Arkansas to its mouth in 1542. Father Marquette and Joliet, the explorer, descended from the Wisconsin to the Arkansas in 1673. In 1680 Father Hennepin, a Jesuit missionary sent by La Salle, ascended the stream from the Illinois to the Falls of St. Anthony. Thus white men had followed the great river for nearly its whole length. But the greatest of all these explorers and the first to traverse the river for the greater part of its course, was the Chevalier Robert de la Salle, and to his name is given the glory of revealing this grand stream to mankind.