How naturally the scene rises before us. The young mother, her heart thrilling with the mysteries of love and life, and elated with the joy of motherhood, alert to the dangers of the new land, and suspicious of the strange people among whom her blue-eyed treasure must live, yet yielding cheerfully to the busy smiling English women who had crossed the ocean with her, and now with womanly intuition ministered to her needs. We can picture them making tidy the confused household, and stilling the cries of the infant as they prepare her to receive the sign of the cross. We can almost picture them deliberating over a choice from among their limited supply of vessels of one worthy to become the receptacle of the water to be used. It was on the Sabbath-Day, and the dedication to God of the wee creature who had so newly come among them was a fitting observance of the day. The solemn words of the ritual of the English Church, never before spoken in that primeval forest, must have awakened mysterious vibrations which linger yet and give to Roanoak Island that atmosphere of perpetual repose which envelops it. There must have come to those who witnessed the scene that holy Sabbath-Day, just as it comes now to those who view it from afar, a deep realization that the God of the English and the Great Spirit of the Indian are one and the same, then, now, and evermore. The One God to whom in baptism Virginia Dare was brought and in whose name Manteo the savage was signed with the cross and given the promise of salvation, and who remains the God of the millions of English-speaking people who now worship in the land which was then and there dedicated to the service of Christ. The mist of oblivion fades before the light of Truth, and Virginia Dare will be a shining jewel in the Chaplet of Memories which some day Christian America will place upon the tomb of the Past. PREFACE A familiar knowledge of the history of one's own country increases patriotism and stimulates valor. For this reason the study of written records called history should be supplemented by research into myths, folk-lore, and legends. While the value of history lies ever in its truth, it must yet bear the ideals of the people who participated in the events narrated. Tradition was the mother of all history, and was necessarily robed in the superstitions of the era of which the tradition tells. History writers, jealously guarding the truth, have striven to banish all traditions which seemed colored by fancy or even freighted with a moral lesson. These exiled traditions, bearing the seed-germs of truth, cannot die, but, like wandering spirits, float down the centuries enveloped in the mists of superstition, until finally, embodied in romance or song, they assume a permanent form called legend and become the heritage of a people. Legends are the satellites of history because they have their origin in the same events, and the history of all countries is interspersed with them.