We were now arrived at the close of our solitary journeyings along the St. Joseph's trail.

The most momentous and far-reaching question ever brought to issue on this continent was: Shall France remain here, or shall she not?

The Spanish voyager, as his caravel ploughed the adjacent seas, might give full scope to his imagination, and dream that beyond the long, low margin of forest which bounded his horizon lay hid a rich harvest for some future conqueror; perhaps a second Mexico with its royal palace and sacred pyramids, or another Cuzco with its temple of the Sun, encircled with a frieze of gold. Haunted by such visions, the ocean chivalry of Spain could not long stand idle.

We were now arrived at the close of our solitary journeyings along the St. Joseph's trail.

Versailles was a gulf into which the labor of France poured its earnings; and it was never full.

The monk, the inquisitor, and the Jesuit were lords of Spain,- sovereigns of her sovereign, for they had formed the dark and narrow mind of that tyrannical recluse. They had formed the minds of her people, quenched in blood every spark of rising heresy, and given over a noble nation to a bigotry blind and inexorable as the doom of fate. Linked with pride, ambition, avarice, every passion of a rich, strong nature, potent for good and ill, it made the Spaniard of that day a scourge as dire as ever fell on man.

America, when it became known to Europeans, was, as it had long been, a scene of wide-spread revolution.