his name to the new continent, while the commanders of the ships in which he sail ed, and a score of other navigators who sailed the Western seas from 1495 to 1504 -men of action, who did much but wrote little-were forgotten almost as soon as they were dead. Columbus died in 1506, six years before Vespucius, and both closed their eyes believing that the islands they had discovered were part of the East Indies, and the mainland along which they had cruised was the coast of China or Japan. Even Cuba was believed to be a part of the continent of Asia until it was circumnavigated in 1508. It is related that during the latter part of Columbus's first outward voyage a flock of land-birds flew over his ships in a southwesterly direction, and that the Admiral, yielding reluctantly to his clamorous and fainthearted crew, changed his course to the southward, and landed on the island of Guanahani, whereas if his original due westward course had been continued he would have first reached the coast of North Carolina: the present United States would have then been the heritage of Ferdinand and Isabella, and New York would be to-day, like Havana, a port of Spain. Similarly trivial in its origin, but

inflexible in its results, was the accident which, without the knowledge of Columbus or Vespucius, named the Western continent for the Florentine navigator instead of the Genoese discoverer.

Just as the name "Indian," given unwittingly by Columbus to the natives of Guanahani, where he first landed in 1492, has stood for all the aborigines of the New World through the four centuries during which it has been known as a separate continent, so the name "America," the ignorant but well-meant suggestion of an obscure inland geographer, has stood ever since, as if to typify the injustice and treachery which pursued the great discoverer through life, and followed him, poor, neglected, and disappointed, to the grave.

IV.-SAINT DIÉ, ANCIENT AND MODERN.

The history of Saint Dié leads us through the barbarism and misery of the Middle Ages, the dreary centuries when the people were helpless vassals of Church and state, when prince and prelate were alike avaricious, cruel, and corrupt, and when the blood and substance of the peasantry were squandered in useless wars.

The chapitre of Saint Dié became embroiled with the neighboring monastery of Senones and with the bishopric of Toul, and the strife and dissension entailed by these quarrels were incredibly bitter and unrelenting.

We have seen that the rude chapel founded by St. Deodatus in the Vale of Galilee about A.D. 660 expanded during the ninth century into the "Petite Église" of Notre Dame, around which grew up a powerful monastery, enclosed by a fortress or citadel, capable of prolonged defence against every enemy except famine. In this monastery the bones of the pious St. Deodatus were preserved in a massive silver coffin, and became the accredited source of a long series of miracles, one of the most useful of which was their habit of causing the bells of the cathedral to ring on the approach of an enemy. During the eighth century the monks of Saint Diez lived under the ascetic rules of St. Benedict, rising at two o'clock in the morning to meditate on the psalms until dawn, and spending their days in labor, fastings, and humiliations of the flesh. This continued until 917-20, when the resistless Huns pillaged the monasteries, and so ruined the country that the few

wretched survivors were forced to choose between starvation and subsistence on human flesh. The rapine and carnage lasted until A.D. 944, at which time there remained alive only a single monk in the monastery of Saint Dié. The town itself was in ruins and its inhabitants dispersed. After fifty years of slow recovery, the grass-grown monastery was secularized by royal authority as a chapitre or abbey of prebendary canons, and brought under a liberal and intelligent rule. The eminent Brunow, who was born at Eguisheim, near Saint Dié, in the year 1002, became successively Grand Prévot of the abbey, Bishop of Toul, and Pope of Rome under the title of Leo IX., and in all these capacities he was able to render important assistance in its restoration and development. Among other privileges which he secured for the chapitre was the authority to issue money. In 1065 the monastery was burned and nearly destroyed by some over-zealous pilgrims from Germany, who believed that the world was to end in chaos on a certain day, and that the surest way of carrying their favorite abiding-place to heaven would be to send it up in flame and smoke, which they did reverently and in good faith.

In the conflagration most of the records of the monastery were lost, but the original church of Notre Dame remained in tact or but slightly damaged, and around it the cathedral and citadel walls were rebuilt. The twelfth century was a period of restoration, during which the chapitre again became so wealthy and powerful that during the wars of the next two hundred years it was an object of envy and rapine from all sides. Its independent and courageous assertion of its rights brought down upon it the vengeance of the Bishop of Toul, in whose diocese it was located, and the struggle for its control made a long and gloomy chapter of war and persecution, in which the peasantry of the Vale of Galilee were ground down to the lowest condition of poverty and servitude. The chapitre, however, held its ground, and by the end of the fifteenth century, when Duke René and Canons Guatrin Lud and Jean Basin came upon the scene, the situation was that which has been briefly indicated in the earlier portion of this sketch.

Morals in Church and state were at a low ebb. The Inquisition spread its terrors throughout Lorraine; a hundred and thirty-four persons were executed for witchcraft in a single year, and the confessions of the poor victims, wrung from them under torture, were sufficient to doom any persons thus accused of having shared in their alleged sorceries. The chapitre clung to its prerogatives with a grip of iron, and the revenues of its canons, although wrung from the life-blood of the people, were princely for that time. Taxation and tithes, added to the corvées, or enforced gratuitous labor on roads and public works, kept the peasant so poor and meagrely fed that epidemics of small-pox, plague, and malignant croup -the diphtheria of modern times-followed each other in rapid sequence, sweeping off in some instances one-sixth of the population of certain districts in a single year. Ignorance and superstition increased the terrors of these visitations: the stricken victims of pestilence were abandoned by the road-side or thrown into barns to perish of neglect and starvation.

The beneficent reign of Duke René II. brought some alleviation to these miseries. If he demanded of his people heroic services in battle, it was to defend their VOL. LXXXV.-No. 509.-66

country from foreign aggression, and in return for their patriotism he sought to shield them from local oppression. Under his influence Canon Lud undertook at Saint Dié several important measures of reform. During an epidemic of the plague he established temporary hospitals into which the sick were gathered, and mendicants and vagabonds were forced to earn their own food and shelter by caring for them. He opened schools, and by edict and example sought to encourage and stimulate the people to higher and better lives. The period of the Vosgian Gymnase shines out as a bright oasis against the dark background of the centuries which preceded and followed it. The influence of Lud and his associates checked for a time the tortures and persecutions for witchcraft; the books that they published and collected turned public attention toward literature and learning; the dawn of a better civilization seemed to have come.

But the time was not yet ripe for such reforms, and before the good canons of the gymnase were cold in their graves the reaction had begun. Within five years the chapitre had joined in the frenzy of persecution against heresy and sorcery. The greedy canons impressed the peasantry into every service that would yield an additional revenue, the forests were cut away from the hills until the valleys, deprived of their natural protection from northerly winds, no longer bore the vine; the denuded heights poured down torrents which submerged the fields and destroyed the crops. As the vine perished, the potato was fortunately introduced from the New World, and this, doubling within a decade the food-producing capacity of the land, finally turned the scale and enabled the decimated population to regain lost ground. It is a curious fact that the introduction of the potato was savagely opposed by the Church, the priests insisting that the new-fangled tuber from the Indies was a lure and device of the evil one. But the canons of Saint Dié, who later on had the courage to defy the authority of Charles V., laughed at the priestly interdiction, planted the forbidden fruit, collected tithes of such as were planted by their vassals, and fed their people for years, while the peasants of war-worn but orthodox France were pinched with hunger.

Through trials and vicissitudes which

it is a relief to pass over in silence, the village of Saint Dié struggled along until the middle of the eighteenth century, when, on the 27th of July, 1757, it was swept by a conflagration which destroyed more than half of the secular portion of the town. At two o'clock in the afternoon, says the chronicle, the fire broke out in the shop of an iron-founder, near the bridge upon which the main street crossed the Meurthe. The houses were of wood, with high sloping roofs shingled with pitch-pine. A strong south wind was blowing, and within four hours a hundred and sixteen buildings, the homes of two hundred and eighty-eight families, were destroyed. The people were panicstricken and fled to the hills, believing that the fire was the vengeance of Heaven, and that the end of the world had come. Such a visitation would have been fatal to Saint Dié but for two facts: the chapitre was spared as a rallying-point, and the country was then under the sceptre of King Stanislas of Poland. Hearing of the disaster, that liberal and enlightened monarch promptly sent supplies of food for the destitute, and then came in person to rally the people and superintend the rebuilding of the town. The main street, which had been nearly destroyed, was narrowed and rebuilt of stone, with roofs of tiles, and Stanislas gave a hundred thousand francs toward the construction of all the front walls on a uniform plan. Thus subsidized and favored, Saint Dié rose from its ashes fairer and greater than before, and a stone pillar in front of the Palace of Justice now attests the gratitude of the people to the King who so royally succored their forefathers in their hour of need.

To this simultaneous rebuilding of a large portion of the town is due the fact that it is one of the best built but least picturesque cities of Lorraine. But what it lost in picturesqueness it gained in sanitary and other advantages, and with its fine and sheltered position it is one of the most healthful towns of its size in central Europe.

Among the historic buildings that had been stricken by the conflagration were the home of Jean Basin, which lost its entire upper story, and the house of Guatrin Lud, wherein had been printed the Cosmographiae just two hundred and fifty years before. The latter was entirely destroyed, except the foundation walls,

and on these was built, about 1759, the Pharmacie Bardy of to-day, whose genial proprietor, as president of the Archæological Society of Saint Dié, preserves not unworthily the traditions of a site hallowed by memories of Guatrin Lud and the gymnase.

Modern Saint Dié is a pleasant thriving town of nearly twelve thousand people, who are engaged mainly in weaving, spinning, tanning, and various industries connected with the manufacture and consumption of pine lumber, which grows abundantly in that picturesque region. The fertile Valley of Galilee is sheltered from the northern winds by a range of lofty wooded hills, chief among which towers a peak known as the Ormont, to the top of which the women of Lorraine still make pilgrimages, in the belief, inherited from pagan times, that a certain fairy holds there periodically a baby-fair, at which would-be mothers are enabled to select in advance the kind of infant that they would prefer. The Ormont and its neighboring summits, the Kemberg, the Spitzenberg, and the Sapin Sec, are clothed with noble forests, and the climate of the valley is mild, but tonic and pure. Saint Dié is the summer home of M. Jules Ferry, who has a pretty chalet on the hill-side southeast of the town, and a few other Parisians have villas in the suburbs; but for some reason-the proximity, perhaps, of Gerardmer and a dozen other spring and mountain resorts-the town is not known and visited by tourists as it deserves to be. It is the terminus of a railway which was originally laid out from Lunéville to Markirch in Alsace, but which stopped abruptly when the events of 1870 drew the new frontier of Germany across its path.

The cathedral, with its exquisite Gothic cloisters; the "Petite Eglise," archaic in its simplicity, but pure in style as a Grecian temple; the citadel walls of red sandstone, softened and enriched in color by the storms and sunshine of centuriesall these remain, stately and beautiful as ever; but the chapitre is no longer supreme, and a modern Protestant church, with its neatly slated spire and cushioned pews, stands near the centre of the town, to mark the foothold of a new faith. The mines of silver and copper which were operated under Guatrin Lud four hundred years ago are ruined and grassgrown, and a factory has usurped the

site of Jean Wisse's paper - mill, which furnished the white sheets for the Cosmographiae.

Perhaps the most modern characteristic of Saint Dié is its devotion to republican politics. Even in midsummer the walls are blazoned with posters reciting the demerits of this or that candidate in terms that must make their ears tingle to read, and the cafés and market-places are eloquent with political discussion. There

is a veneering of Parisian smartness about the shops and restaurants, a band plays in the handsome park by the river on summer evenings, and except for Monsieur Bardy and his little group of amateur archæologists, it is doubtful whether half a dozen citizens of modern Saint Dié ever heard of the Cosmographiae Introductio, or suspect that they are living in the footprints of the men who gave America its name.

CHAPTER VII.

IT was a hot afternoon in August.

dows wide open, but no breeze came in, only the fervid breath of the fields and the white road outside.

She sat at a front window and darned a white stocking; her long thin arms and her neck showed faintly through her old loose muslin sacque. The muslin was white, with a close - set lavender sprig, and she wore a cameo brooch at her throat. The blinds were closed, and she had to bend low over her mending in order to see in the green gloom.

Mrs. Babcock came toiling up the bank to the house, but Amanda did not notice her until she reached the front door. Then she fetched a great laboring sigh.

"Oh, hum!" said she, audibly, in a wrathful voice; "if I'd had any idea of it, I wouldn't have come a step.

Then Amanda looked out with a start. "Is that you, Mis' Babcock?" she called hospitably through the blind.

"Yes, it's me-what's left of me. hum! Oh, hum!"

Oh,

Amanda ran and opened the door, and Mrs. Babcock entered, panting. She had a green umbrella, which she furled with difficulty at the door, and a palm-leaf fan. Her face, in the depths of her scooping green barége bonnet, was dank with perspiration and scowling with indignant misery. She sank into a chair, and fanned herself with a desperate air.

Amanda set her umbrella in the corner, then she stood looking sympathetically at her. "It's a pretty hot day, ain't it?" said she.

"I should think 'twas hot. Oh, hum!" "Don't you want me to get you a tumbler of water?"

"I dun know. I don't drink much cold water; it don't agree with me very well. Oh, dear! You ain't got any of your beer made, I s'pose?"

"No, I ain't. I'm dreadful sorry. Don't you want a swaller of cold tea?" "Well, I dun know, but I'll have jest a swaller, if you've got some. me, hum!"

Oh, dear

Amanda went out hurriedly, and returned with a britannia teapot and a tumbler. She poured out some tea, and Mrs. Babcock drank with desperate gulps.

"I think cold tea is better for anybody than cold water in hot weather," said Amanda. "Won't you have another swaller, Mis' Babcock?"

Mrs. Babcock shook her head, and Amanda carried the teapot and tumbler back to the kitchen, then she seated herself again, and resumed her mending. Mrs. Babcock fanned and panted and eyed Amanda.

"You look cool enough in that old muslin sacque," said she, in a tone of vicious injury.

'Yes, it is real cool. I've kept this sacque on purpose for a real hot day."

"Well, it's dreadful long in the shoulder seams, 'cordin' to the way they make 'em now, but I s'pose it's cool. Oh, hum! I ruther guess I shouldn't have come out of the house, if I'd any idea how hot 'twas in the sun. Seems to me it's hot as an oven here. I should think you'd air off your house early in the mornin', an' then shut your windows tight, an' keep the heat out."