Perhaps it is not indiscreet to say that one circumstance of Dr. Smyth's life gave him exceptional opportunities for that dreaming on his special object which is found to be the invariable incubation, so to say, preceding all great discoveries. For some years Dr. Smyth was United States consul at Carthagena, that unspoiled haunted city of the Spanish Main, which, it may be recalled, furnishes a spirited chapter in the history of Roderick Random, Esquire, of His Majesty's Navy. He was, therefore, seated by the very door to that land of enchantment, which, as we have been saying, had drawn so many adventurous spirits under roaring canvas across the seas, in the spacious days. He was but a short mule-back journey from that table-land raised high in the upper Andes where Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, is situated, the region around which all those "superstitions" retailed by Indians to those early adventurers centre. Descendants of the same Indians still tell the same stories, and still the average prosaic mind laughs at them as "superstitions." El Dorado! as if any one could take it seriously nowadays! Has not the term long been a picturesque synonym for The City of Impossible Happiness, the Land of Heart's Desire, the Paradise of Fools, and all such cities and realms and destinations and states of being, as the yearning heart of man, finding nowhere on the earth he knows, imagines in the sun-tipped cloudland of his dreams, and toward which he pathetically turns his eyes, and stretches out his arms to the end? But what if El Dorado were no such mere figment of man's aching fancy, after all; what if the El Dorado, so passionately believed in by those eminently practical Elizabethans, did all the time, as they surmised, exist upon this solid earth, and should still quite concretely exist there.... Is it not likely that such might be the musings of a man situated as was Dr. Smyth, in the very heart of the mystery, a man of affairs, touched with imagination, as all really capable men of affairs are; and, as he listened to the old Indian tales, and talked with miners, and all manner of folk acquainted with the _terrain_ of the legend, what could he do but fall under the same spell that had laid its ghostly hand on the mighty heart of Raleigh centuries before, and follow its beckoning, as the other inspired madmen before him? But, as we have seen, his doom was to be different. For so long generations of dead men had come crying, like those three old horsemen in Morris's _Glittering Plain_: "Is this the Land? Is this the Land?" to turn broken-hearted away; but from him, of all men born, throughout the generations, was to be heard at last the joyous, ringing cry: "This _is_ the Land! This _is_ the Land!"