retty ornament, had now to work with frantic energy in the river sands;
or in other cases, to toil through the heat of the day in the cotton
fields which they had formerly only cultivated enough to furnish their
very scant requirements of use and adornment. One or two caciques,
knowing that their people could not possibly furnish the required amount
of gold, begged that its value in grain might be accepted instead; but
that was not the kind of wealth that Columbus was seeking. It must be
gold or nothing; and rather than receive any other article from the
gold-bearing districts, he consented to take half the amount.

Thus step by step, and under the banner of the Holy Catholic religion,
did dark and cruel misery march through the groves and glades of the
island and banish for ever its ancient peace. This long-vanished race
that was native to the island of Espanola seems to have had some of the
happiest and most lovable qualities known to dwellers on this planet.
They had none of the brutalities of the African, the paralysing wisdom of
the Asian, nor the tragic potentialities of the European peoples. Their
life was from day to day, and from season to season, like the life of
flowers and birds. They lived in such order and peaceable community as
the common sense of their own simple needs suggested; they craved no
pleasures except those that came free from nature, and sought no wealth
but what the sun gave them. In their verdant island, near to the heart
and source of light, surrounded by the murmur of the sea, and so enriched
by nature that the idea, of any other kind of riches never occurred to
them, their existence went to a happy dancing measure like that of the
fauns and nymphs in whose charmed existence they believed. The sun and
moon were to them creatures of their island who had escaped from a cavern
by the shore and now wandered free in the upper air, peopling it with
happy stars; and man himself they believed to have sprung from crevices
in the rocks, like the plants that grew tall and beautiful wherever there
was a handful of soil for their roots. Poor happy children! You are all
dead a long while ago now, and have long been hushed in the great humming
sleep and silence of Time; the modern world has no time nor room for
people like you, with so much kindness and so little ambition . . . .
Yet their free pagan souls were given a chance to be penned within the
Christian fold; the priest accompanied the