had thought that the face of a white man would
never more grieve my sight."

"Is, then, the face of the white man so distasteful to you?" asked Paul.

"It _was_; but some change must have come over me, for while I hold
converse with you the old hatred seems melting away. If I had met you
eight or ten years ago, I verily believe that I would have killed you
all in cold blood, but now--"

He stopped abruptly, and gazed into the flames of the camp-fire, with a
grave, almost tender air that seemed greatly at variance with his last
murderous remark.

"However, the feeling is past and gone--it is dead," he presently
resumed, with a toss of his head which sent the yellow curls back, and
appeared at the same time to cast unpleasant memories behind him, "and I
am now glad to see and welcome you, though I cannot help grieving that
the white race has discovered my lonely island. They might have
discovered it long ago if they had only kept their ears open."

"Is it a big island, then--not a cluster of islands?" asked Trench
eagerly.

"Yes, it is a large island, and there is a great continent of unknown
extent to the westward of it."

"But what do you mean, stranger, by saying that it might have been
discovered long ago if people had kept their ears open?" asked Paul.
"It is well known that only a few years ago a sea-captain named Columbus
discovered the great continent of which you speak, and that so recently
as the year 1497 the bold mariner, John Cabot, with his son Sebastian,
discovered these islands, which they have named Newfoundland."

The stranger listened with evident interest, not unmingled with
surprise, to this.

"Of Columbus and Cabot I have never heard," he replied, "having had no
intercourse with the civilised world for twenty years. I knew of this
island and dwelt on it long before the time you say that Cabot came.
But that reminds me that once, on returning from a hunting expedition
into the interior, it was reported to me by Indians that a giant canoe
had been seen off the coast. That may have been Cabot's ship. As to
Columbus, my forefathers discovered the great continent lying to the
west of this about five hundred years before he could have been born.
When I was a boy, my father, whose memory was stored with innumerable
scraps of the old viking sagas, or stories, used to tell me about the
discovery of Vinland by the Norsemen, which is just the land that seems
to have been re-discovered by Columb