E-text prepared by Melissa McDaniel and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org) Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustration. See 58403-h.htm or 58403-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/58403/58403-h/58403-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/58403/58403-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/johnvytaltaleofl00pays [Illustration: JOHN VYTAL] JOHN VYTAL A Tale of The Lost Colony by WILLIAM FARQUHAR PAYSON [Illustration] New York and London Harper & Brothers Publishers 1901 Copyright, 1901, by Harper & Brothers. All rights reserved. “He was one of a lean body and visage, as if his eager soul, biting for anger at the clog of his body, desired to fret a passage through it.” THOMAS FULLER Foreword No epoch in American history is more essentially romantic than that in which, for a few years, less than one hundred colonists from England lived on the island of Roanoke, off the coast of old Virginia. Nevertheless, although the history of our continent, from the landing of Columbus to the end of the Spanish-American war, has been exhaustively exploited in fiction, the pages dated 1587-1598 seem to have been left unturned. Yet the life of the Roanoke colony contained not only adventure, hazard, and privation in a far greater degree than the maturer settlements of later years, but also an underlying emblematical element, and in its end an insoluble riddle. In being thus both _mystical_ and _mysterious_, it paramountly inspires romance. The mystery has filled many pages of history, but always as an enigma without solution. The fate of the colony is utterly unknown, historians of necessity relegating it to the limbo of oblivion. Bancroft, for one, concludes his account of the colonization thus: “The conjecture has been hazarded [by Lawson and others] that the deserted colony, neglected by their own countrymen, were hospitably adopted into the tribe of Hatteras Indians, and became amalgamated with the sons of the forest. This was the tradition of the natives at a later day, and was thought to be confirmed by the physical character of the tribe in which the English and the Indian race seemed to have been blended. Raleigh long cherished the hope of discovering some vestiges of their existence, and though he had abandoned the design of colonizing Virginia, he yet sent, at his own charge, and, it is said, at five several times, to search for his liege-men. But it was all in vain; imagination received no help in its attempts to trace the fate of the colony of Roanoke.”