ther land,
Whiteman's Land--or Ireland the Mickle, as some called it. For these
Norse traders from Limerick had found Ari Marson, and Ketla of Ruykjanes,
supposed to have been long since drowned at sea, and said that the people
had made him and Ketla chiefs, and baptised Ari. What is all this? and
what is this, too, which the Esquimaux children taken in Markland told
the Northmen, of a land beyond them where the folk wore white clothes,
and carried flags on poles? Are these all dreams? or was some part of
that great civilisation, the relics whereof your antiquarians find in so
many parts of the United States, still in existence some 900 years ago;
and were these old Norse cousins of ours upon the very edge of it? Be
that as it may, how nearly did these fierce Vikings, some of whom seemed
to have sailed far south along the shore, become aware that just beyond
them lay a land of fruits and spices, gold, and gems? The adverse
current of the Gulf Stream, it may be, would have long prevented their
getting past the Bahamas into the Gulf of Mexico; but, sooner or later,
some storm must have carried a Greenland viking to San Domingo, or to
Cuba; and then, as has been well said, some Scandinavian dynasty might
have sat upon the throne of Mexico.

These stories are well known to antiquarians. They may be found, almost
all of them, in Professor Rafn's _Antiquitates Americanae_. The action
in them stands out often so clear and dramatic, that the internal
evidence of historic truth is irresistible. Thorvald, who, when he saw
what seems to be, they say, the bluff head of Alderton at the south-east
end of Boston Bay, said, 'Here should I like to dwell,' and, shot by an
Esquimaux arrow, bade bury him on that place, with a cross at his head
and a cross at his feet, and call the place Cross Ness for evermore;
Gudrida, the magnificent widow, who wins hearts and sees strange deeds
from Iceland to Greenland, and Greenland to Vinland and back, and at
last, worn out and sad, goes off on a pilgrimage to Rome; Helgi and
Finnbogi, the Norwegians, who, like our Arctic voyagers in after times,
devise all sorts of sports and games to keep the men in humour during the
long winter at Hope; and last, but not least, the terrible Freydisa, who
when the Norse are seized with a sudden panic at the Esquimaux, and flee
from them, as they had three weeks before fled from Thorfinn's bellowing
bull, turns, when so weak that she cannot escape, single-han