course of Are Marson, who was discovered in the country by Asbrandson, must have sailed along our shores. Still no record of such a visit now remains, which is not at all singular, since many a voyager went by, both before and afterwards, with the same failure to signalize the event for the information of posterity. “They had no poet and they died.” Turning to the voyages of the Welsh, who, some think, reached the western continent about the year 1170, led by Madoc, Prince of Wales, there is the same failure to connect them with this region. Catlin, who visited the White or Mandan Indians, supposes that the Welch sailed down the coast to the Bay of Mexico and ascended the Mississippi; although there is just as much reason to hold, if the Mandans were their descendants, that they entered the continent and found their way westward from the region of Massachusetts or New York. The latter, however, might be favored, for the reason that our noble river forms to-day the most popular and certainly the most splendid gateway to the far West. The voyages of the Zeno brothers, who are believed by most competent critics to have reached America about the close of the fourteenth century, and who left a chart, first published in 1558, show a country called “Drogeo,” a vast region which stretched far to the south, whose inhabitants were clothed in skins, and subsisted by hunting, being armed with bows and arrows, and living in a state of war. The description would apply to our part of the coast. At this period the Red Indians had come from the west, and dispersed the original inhabitants, known to the Northmen as Skraellings. The red man on this coast was an invader and conqueror, not the original proprietor of the land. In a very brief time, however, he forgot his own traditions and indulged in the belief that he was the first holder of this region, which was deeded to him by the Great Father in fee simple; and it was in this belief that, in turn, the simple savage conveyed vast tracts of territory to the white man, in consideration of trinkets and fire-water. [Illustration: SEBASTIAN CABOT.]