besides fetters to bind, and bloodhounds to hunt them, they brought
priests and monks for the saving of their souls.

The adventurers began their march. Their story has been often told. For
month after month and year after year, the procession of priests and
cavaliers, crossbowmen, arquebusiers, and Indian captives laden with the
baggage, still wandered on through wild and boundless wastes, lured
hither and thither by the ignis fatuus of their hopes. They traversed
great portions of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, everywhere
inflicting and enduring misery, but never approaching their phantom El
Dorado. At length, in the third year of their journeying, they reached
the banks of the Mississippi, a hundred and thirty-two years before its
second discovery by Marquette. One of their number describes the great
river as almost half a league wide, deep, rapid, and constantly rolling
down trees and drift-wood on its turbid current.

The Spaniards crossed over at a point above the mouth of the Arkansas.
They advanced westward, but found no treasures,--nothing indeed but
hardships, and an Indian enemy, furious, writes one of their officers,
"as mad dogs." They heard of a country towards the north where maize
could not be cultivated because the vast herds of wild cattle devoured
it. They penetrated so far that they entered the range of the roving
prairie tribes; for, one day, as they pushed their way with difficulty
across great plains covered with tall, rank grass, they met a band of
savages who dwelt in lodges of skins sewed together, subsisting on game
alone, and wandering perpetually from place to place. Finding neither
gold nor the South Sea, for both of which they had hoped, they returned
to the banks of the Mississippi.

De Soto, says one of those who accompanied him, was a "stern man, and of