stories. Among the books written in Iceland there was
one called the 'National Name-Book,' in which all the
names of the people were written down, with an account
of their forefathers and of any notable things which they
had done.

It is from this book and from the old sagas that we learn
how the Norsemen came to the coast of America. It seems
that about 900 a certain man called Gunnbjorn was driven
westward in a great storm and thrown on the rocky shore
of an ice-bound country, where he spent the winter.
Gunnbjorn reached home safely, and never tried again to
find this new land; but, long after his death, the story
that there was land farther west still lingered among
the settlers in Iceland and the Orkneys, and in other
homes of the Norsemen. Some time after Gunnbjorn's voyage
it happened that a very bold and determined man called
Eric the Red, who lived in the Orkneys, was made an outlaw
for having killed several men in a quarrel. Eric fled
westward over the seas about the year 980, and he came
to a new country with great rocky bays and fjords as in
Norway. There were no trees, but the slopes of the
hillsides were bright with grass, so he called the country
Greenland, as it is called to this day. Eric and his men
lived in Greenland for three years, and the ruins of
their rough stone houses are still to be seen, hard by
one of the little Danish settlements of to-day. When Eric
and his followers went back to Iceland they told of what
they had seen, and soon he led a new expedition to
Greenland. The adventurers went in twenty-five ships;