the Margaret Frazer of old days— graver,
more portly, more stern I had almost said.
But, as I watched and thought, I saw her
come to the dining-room window with a
baby in her arms, and her whole face melted
into a smile of infinite sweetness.

           A GOLDEN LEGEND.

IN fifteen hundred and thirty-one, Diego
de Ordaz, one of the followers of Cortez to
Mexico, set out to explore the Orinoco.
He got as far as the cataract of the Atures,
when the hostility of the Indians, and the
difficulty of ascending the rapids, forced him
to return.  He was the first European who
attempted to explore the river, and it was
forty years after his failure before the attempt
was renewed.  Juan da Silva organised
the second expedition; one of the members
of which was a certain Juan Martin de
Albujar, who was taken prisoner by the
Caribs, or Caribisi Indians, of the Lower
Orinoco, and lived for many years among
them, wandering from tent to tent, and tribe
to tribe, at once prisoner and comrade.  On
his adventures— so at least it is supposed—
was founded that wonderful narration of
Juan Martinez, which led to the disastrous
expedition of Domingo de Vera, fitted out by
Philip the Second. De Vera's equipment
consisted of two thousand armed men, devoted
to the conquest of the Dorado so graphically
described by Martinez; together with ten
lay priests and a rich canon of the cathedral,
with the title of Administrator General, to
attend to the spiritual needs and necessities
of the marauders; and twelve cowled monks
for the conversion of the heathen. Domingo
did not accomplish much. Disease, famine,
shipwreck, and the Indians put an end to the
expedition; and, of the two thousand armed
men who went out flushed with hope and
strong in the filibuster's faith, only a handful
were spared to tell the fate of the rest. It
was a tragical result to a mediaeval Spanish
version of Munchausen.

Sir Walter Raleigh was as deeply bitten as
the rest, and must needs fit out an expedition
to discover "that mighty, rich, and bewtifull
Empire of Guiana, and that great and golden
citie which the Spanyards call El Dorado,
and the naturals Manoa."  On Thursday the
sixth of February, fifteen hundred and ninety-five,
he set sail, on the conquest of what he
believed would prove the glory and the
enrichment of England for ever and aye. His
was no ordinary filibustering expedition; no
vulgar pickeering; *  but the attainment of
such national wealth as should exalt that
terrible old lioness, Elizabeth, of his simulated
love so far above her rival, that Spain
would be fain to hide her diminished head
before her.
* To pickeer (rob or pillage).

"It becomes not the former fortune in
which I once lived,"  says he, "to goe journeys
of picorie,*  and it had sorted ill with the
offices of honour, which by her Majesties
Grace I hold to this day in England to run
from cape to cape, and from place to place,
for the pillage of ordinary prizes."
* Picaro (rogue), Spanish.

El Dorado, the city of Manoa, as described
by the veracious Juan Martinez, was in truth no
ordinary prize, but one well worth both search
and danger. A place where the very kitchen
utensils were of gold and silver, and where
brobdignagian gardens full of trees and birds
and colossal statues all of gold abounded, was
no ordinary country for an English knight to
annex. Pity only that it was not true, and
that it would have been just as profitable to
have set out in search of the cities of the
moon as of the city of Manoa. Although,
indeed, the later discoveries of California,
of gold lying in the rocks and beneath
the rivers there, seem to give more than a
colouring of probability to the tradition of
the sixteenth century. Martinez, or the
author under his name, romancer as he was,
might, and very probably did, give a definite
shape to floating reports, rather than create
a romance of his own without any substratum
of fact or tradition. He dressed up all he
heard, and coloured to the highest point
every most shadowy sketch; but we think it
more than likely that he did not invent the
whole. This was his story: the story that
befooled a King of Spain and dazzled the
intellects of one of England's greatest men:

When Ordaz, of whom we have spoken
above, was lying at the port of Morequito, on
his way up the Orinoco, "by some negligence
the whole store of powder provided for the
service was set on fire " for which piece of
negligence Martinez, who had the command
and charge of the same, was condemned to be
executed forthwith. Being much beloved by
the soldiers, he obtained, as a boon, that they
should place him in a canoe alone, without
food, but well armed, and thus set him adrift
on the river. These were the best terms he
could make for himself, and he was thankful
for their grace. As it chanced, he met that
very evening some Guianians, who, never
having seen a civilised man before, took
Martinez as a grand prize and valuable
curiosity; leading him as a show from town to
town, until they brought him, blindfold, to
the city of Manoa, where Inga—we should
say the Inca, or king lived. He was fourteen
or fifteen days on the journey, he said,
yet unable to give any distinct account
thereof, having been kept carefully blindfold
all the way.

He entered the city of Manoa at noon,
when instantly they unbound his eyes. He
travelled  "al that daie til night throw the
citie, and the next day from sun-rising to
sun-setting, ere he came to the pallace of
Inga."  This would make the city fifty miles