road to the East Indies by the way of the Cape of Good Hope, so injured the trade of Venice with the east as to render her downfall inevitable. But the history of the old sea kings of the north, and the tracing of their line of descent through old England to the hardy seaman of New England, is still more interesting to our naval students. The Vikings--"sons of the fiords"--were undoubtedly the most arrant pirates of all history. They were the dread of all Europe. "A furore Normanorum librera nos Domine," prayed the Church throughout Christendom. Many of these piratical princes became, through habitual success, so devoted to their calling that they never extinguished it, but rather gloried in passing their lives on board their ships. It was their fond boast that they never reposed under an immovable roof, nor drank their beer in peace by their fireside, and the ships in which they had led their wild and adventurous lives formed in death their sepulchre. Passing over the discovery of North America by Eric the Red (about 700 B.C.), we may come at once to Harold Harfagra--Harold the Fairhaired, or Harold Fairfax, a name so well represented to-day in our own navy. Having made himself master of all Norway, the restless young spirits of the realm took themselves off on one of their accustomed expeditions. Led by a youth named Rollo, son of the celebrated sea-rover Jarl Ragnvald, they ascended the Seine and laid siege to Paris. So successful were these Normans that Charles the Simple ceded to Rollo that part of Neustria since called Normandy. By the terms of the treaty, Charles was to give his daughter Gisele in marriage to Rollo, together with the province of Normandy, provided he would do homage, and embrace the Christian religion. To do homage was to kiss the feet of the king. All that the sturdy Rollo could be prevailed upon to do, however, was to place his hand in that of the king, and to depute one of his followers to do homage for him. The gentleman to whom this duty was assigned raised the king's foot so high that his majesty was thrown upon his back; whereupon the rude Normans burst out laughing, so little respect for royalty had these wild rovers of the sea. Two hundred years later the descendants of these same Normans achieved the Conquest of England. They became by the heat of much and continued contest and attrition gradually fused, with the Angles and the Saxons, already inhabitants of the island, into the modern Englishman and his representative on the shores of New England.