ctrine. "The Devil is the best thing in the world," they cried; "we
adore him; he makes men brave." Even the Jesuits despaired, and
abandoned Florida in disgust.

Menendez was summoned home, where fresh honors awaited him from the
crown, though, according to the somewhat doubtful assertion of the
heretical Grotius, his deeds had left a stain upon his name among the
people. He was given command of the armada of three hundred sail and
twenty thousand men, which, in 1574, was gathered at Santander against
England and Flanders. But now, at the climax of his fortunes, his career
was abruptly closed. He died suddenly, at the age of fifty-five. What
caused his death? Grotius affirms that he killed himself; but, in his
eagerness to point the moral of his story, he seems to have overstepped
the bounds of historic truth. The Spanish bigot was rarely a suicide,
for the rights of Christian burial and repose in consecrated ground were
denied to the remains of the self-murderer. There is positive evidence,
too, in a codicil to the will of Menendez, dated at Santander on the
fifteenth of September, 1574, that he was on that day seriously ill,
though, as the instrument declares, "sound of mind." There is reason,
then, to believe that this pious cut-throat died a natural death,
crowned with honors, and compassed by the consolations of his religion.

It was he who crushed French Protestantism in America. To plant
religious freedom on this Western soil was not the mission of France. It
was for her to rear in Northern forests the banner of Absolutism and of
Rome; while, among the rocks of Massachusetts, England and Calvin
fronted her in dogged and deadly opposition.

Civilization in North America found its pioneer, its forlorn hope, less
in England than in France. For, long before the ice-crusted pines of
Plymouth had listened to the rugged psalmody of the Puritan, the
solitudes of Western New York and the shadowy wilderness of Lake Huron
were trodden by the iron heel of the soldier and the sandalled foot of
the Franciscan friar. They who bore the fleur-de-lis were always in the
van, patient, daring, indomitable. And foremost on this bright roll of
forest-chivalry stands the half-forgotten name of Samuel de Champlain.

LINA.

The evenings were always dull and long to those of us who were too far
from home to make it worth while to leave the school for the eight weeks
of holiday. It was dreary indeed sitting in the great school-