account, but fishing to lay up supplies at Sable Island, one of the vessels had been wrecked. For four years they had been hounded by a persistent ill-luck: First, when robbed by the French governor on pretense of a fine for going to the North without his permission; second, when befooled by the false promises of the French court; third, when Captain Gillam refused to proceed farther amid the Northern ice; and now, when the wreck of the vessel involved them in a lawsuit. In Boston, they had won their lawsuit, but the ill-luck left them destitute. Carterett, the Royal Commissioner, had met them in Boston and had persuaded them to come to England with him. The commander of the Dutch ship listened to their story and took down a report of it in writing. Could they not be persuaded to come on with him to Holland? The two Frenchmen refused to leave Carterett. Groseillers, Radisson and Carterett were then landed in Spain. From Spain, they begged and borrowed and pawned their way to France, and from France got passage to Dover. Here, then, they had come to the king at Oxford with their amazing story. The stirring adventures of these two explorers, I have told in another volume, and an exact transcript of their journals I am giving elsewhere, but their story was one to make King Charles marvel. How Radisson as a boy had been captured by the Mohawks and escaped through the Dutch settlement of New York; how, as a youth, he had helped the Jesuits to flee from a beleaguered fort at Onondaga; how before he was twenty-five years old, he had gone overland to the Mississippi where he heard from Cree and Sioux of the Sea of the North; and how before he was thirty, he had found that sea where Hudson had perished—all those adventures King Charles heard. The King listened and pondered, and pondered and listened, and especially did he listen to that story of the Sea of the North, which Henry Hudson had found in 1610 and from which Radisson sixty years later had brought 600,000 beaver. Beaver at that time was worth much more than it is to-day. That cargo of beaver, which Radisson had brought down from Hudson Bay to Quebec would be worth more than a million dollars in modern money.