would carve on a tree the name of the place to which they had
gone.

The arrival of those colonists, the birth and baptism of Virginia Dare,
the return of White to England, the disappearance of the colony, and
the finding of the word Croatoan, these facts form the record of that
colony, the disappearance of which is a mystery which history has not
solved.

But tradition illumines many periods of the past which history leaves
in darkness, and tradition tells how this colony found among friendly
Indians a refuge from the dangers of Roanoak Island, and how this
infant grew into fair maidenhood, and was changed by the sorcery of a
rejected lover into _a white doe_, which roamed the lonely island and
bore a charmed life, and how finally true love triumphed over magic and
restored her to human form,--only to result in the death of the maiden
from a silver arrow shot by a cruel chieftain.

This tradition of a white doe and a silver arrow has survived through
three centuries, and not only lingers where the events occurred, but
some portions of it are found wherever in our land forests abound and
deer abide. From Maine to Florida lumbermen are everywhere familiar
with an old superstition that to see a white doe is an evil omen. In
some localities lumbermen will quit work if a white deer is seen. That
such a creature as a white deer really exists is demonstrated by their
capture and exhibition in menageries, and to-day the rude hunters of
the Alleghany Mountains believe that only a silver arrow will kill a
white deer.

The disappearance of this colony has been truly called "the tragedy of
American colonization," and around it has hung a pathetic interest
which ever leads to renewed investigation, in the hope of solving the
mystery. From recent search into the subject by students of history a
chain of evidence has been woven from which it has come to be believed
that the lost colony, hopeless of succor from England, and deprived of
all other human associations, became a part of a tribe of friendly
Croatoan Indians, shared their wanderings, and intermarried with them,
and that their descendants are to be found to-day among the Croatoan
Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina.

(Those who desire to investigate this supposed solution of the mystery
can easily secure the facts and the conclusions formed by those who
have made a careful study of the subject.)

Of course, it can never be known _certainly_ whether Virginia Dare