of strawberry vines, and sloping invitingly to the lip of the crystal
water, must have won the tired mariners.

The explorers found themselves on the edge of a vast forest of oak,
hemlock, maple, and pine; but they saw no sassafras-trees to speak of,
nor did they encounter--what would have been infinitely less to their
taste--and red-men. Here and there were discoverable the scattered ashes
of fires where the Indians had encamped earlier in the spring; they
were absent now, at the silvery falls, higher up the stream, where fish
abounded at that season. The soft June breeze, laden with the delicate
breath of wild-flowers and the pungent odors of spruce and pine, ruffled
the duplicate sky in the water; the new leaves lisped pleasantly in the
tree tops, and the birds were singing as if they had gone mad. No ruder
sound or movement of life disturbed the primeval solitude. Master Pring
would scarcely recognize the spot were he to land there to-day.

Eleven years afterwards a much cleverer man than the commander of the
Speedwell dropped anchor in the Piscataqua--Captain John Smith of famous
memory. After slaying Turks in hand-to-hand combats, and doing all sorts
of doughty deeds wherever he chanced to decorate the globe with his
presence, he had come with two vessels to the fisheries on the rocky
selvage of Maine, when curiosity, or perhaps a deeper motive, led him
to examine the neighboring shore lines. With eight of his men in a small
boat, a ship's yawl, he skirted the coast from Penobscot Bay to Cape
Cod, keeping his eye open. This keeping his eye open was a peculiarity
of the little captain; possibly a family trait. It was Smith who really
discovered the Isles of Shoals, exploring in person those masses of
bleached rock--those "isles assez hautes," of which the French navigator
Pierre de Guast, Sieur de Monts, had caught a bird's-eye glimpse through
the twilight in 1605. Captain Smith christened the group Smith's Isles,