8 LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI.

a fashion, by dividing it up in this way : After De Soto glimpsed the
river, a fraction short of a quarter of a century elapsed, and then
Shakspeare was born; lived a trifle more than half a century, then
died; and when he had been in his grave considerably more than half
a century, the second white man saw the Mississippi. In our day we
don't allow a hundred and thirty years to elapse between glimpses of
a marvel. If somebody should discover a creek in the county next to
the one that the North Pole is in, Europe and America would start

BURIAL OP DE SOTO.

fifteen costly expeditions thither : one to explore the creek, and the
other fourteen to hunt for each other.
For more than a hundred and fifty years there had been white
settlements on our Atlantic coasts. These people were in intimate
cxonmunication with the Indians : in the south the Spaniards were
robbing, slaughtering, enslaving and converting them; higher up, the
English were trading beads and blankets to them for a consideration,
and throwing in civilisation and whiskey, * for lagniappe ;'l and in
Canada the French were schooling them in a rudimentary way, mis-
1 See p. 402.