well-ordered and stable; and the people received the visitors with open-handed hospitality. After refreshing his followers, Pizarro continued his explorations down the coast for a couple of hundred miles, finding a succession of fertile valleys interrupting the monotonous desert, each filled with villages and farms and a thriving, civilised, and prosperous population. In the fall of 1527 he returned to Panama, full of the idea of leading an expedition to conquer the great empire about which he had obtained such minute and exact information. He wisely resolved himself to go to Spain and secure the direct patronage and countenance of the government at Madrid. Taking with him natives brought from Tumbez and specimens of products, he set off, and on his arrival was granted an audience by Charles V. The Emperor was greatly impressed by the story which the adventurer told. Naturally of a noble and commanding presence, the conscious dignity of Pizarro's manners corresponded to the high ambitions which filled his mind. In the doing of great things he had dropped all evidences of his base origin, and contact with men and the habit of command had given him an ease of address and clearness of thought which made his hearers forget the deficiencies of his early education. The concession he prayed for was granted. He himself was legitimatised and ennobled and received the title of "adelantado," while the gallant followers who had refused to abandon him on the Colombian island were made gentlemen of coat-armour. Pizarro and his partners were formally authorised to conquer and settle Peru in the name of the Castilian sovereign and received a grant of money for the purchase of arms, agreeing to remit to the royal treasury one-fifth of all the gold that they should find. Pizarro knew just the kind of men needed to assist in this hazardous enterprise, and he took every precaution to select only those of whose valour and capacity he was well assured. His mother had bred up a family of lions in the little old Estremadura town, and his four brothers were hardly his inferiors in valour and audacity. Hernando, the oldest and only legitimate son of Francisco's father, agreed to go. So did Juan and Gonzalo, two illegitimate brothers who were younger, and also Francisco Alcantara, a half-brother on the mother's side. Hernando Cortes, the noble conqueror of Mexico, exerted himself to help Pizarro fill up his ranks with soldiers of the most approved courage, and the latter finally sailed for the Isthmus with a small body picked from the very flower of the fighting men of the Peninsula.