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was peopled by fierce and warlike tribes. Shipwreck was to be dreaded, and a landing might for weeks or months be unsafe, if not impracticable. But what were such secondary dangers contrasted with the perils, doubly terrible from their unknown and mysterious nature, incurred by the sanguine Genoese and his bold companions, when they turned their brigantine's prow westward from Europe, and sailed—they knew not whither? Here the path was comparatively plain, and the goal ascertained; and although risks must be dared, reward was tolerably certain: for further tidings of the Peruvian empire had reached the ears of the Spaniards, less shadowy and incomplete than the vague hints received by Balboa from an Indian chief. Andagoya, the officer whom illness had compelled to abandon an expedition when it was scarcely commenced, had brought back intelligence far more explicit, obtained from Indian traders who had penetrated by land into the empire of the Incas, as far (so he says in his own manuscript, comprised in Navarrete's collection) as its capital city of Cuzco. They spoke of a pagan but civilised land, opulent and flourishing; they described the divisions of its provinces, the wealth of its cities, the manners and usages of its inhabitants. But had their description been far more minute and glowing, the imagination of those who received the accounts would still have outstripped reality and possibility. Those were the days of golden visions and chimerical day-dreams. In the fancy of the greedy and credulous Spaniards, each corner of the New World contained treasures, compared to which the golden trees and jewelled fruits of Aladdin's garden were paste and tinsel. The exaggerated reports of those adventurers who returned wealth-laden to Spain, were swoln by repetition to dimensions which enchantment only could have realised. No marvels were too monstrous and unwieldy for the craving gullet of popular credulity. "They listened with attentive ears to tales of Amazons, which seemed to revive the classic legends of antiquity, to stories of Patagonian giants, to flaming pictures of an El-Dorado, where the sands sparkled with gems, and golden pebbles as large as birds' eggs were dragged in nets out of the rivers." And expeditions were actually undertaken in search of a magical Fountain of Health, of golden sepulchres and temples. The Amazons and the water of life are still to be discovered; but as to golden temples and jewelled sands, their equivalents, at least, were forthcoming,—not for the many, but for a chosen and lucky few. Of the fortunes of these the record is preserved; of the misfortunes of those comparatively little is told us. We hear of the thousands of golden castellanos that fell to the lot of men, who a moment previously, were without a maravedi in their tattered pouches; we find no catalogue of the fever-stricken victims who left their bones in the noxious districts of Panama and Castillo de Oro. And those who achieved riches, earned them hardly by peril and privation, although, in the magnificence of the plunder, past sufferings were quickly forgotten. Thrice did Pizarro and his daring companions sail southward; countless were their hardships, bitter their disappointments, before the sunshine of success rewarded their toils, revealing to them treasures that must in some degree have appeased even their appetite for lucre. They came suddenly upon a town whose inhabitants, taken by surprise, fled in consternation, abandoning their property to the invaders. It was the emerald region, and great store of the gems fell into the hands of the Spaniards. Pizarro had one as large as a pigeon's egg. A quantity of crowns and other ornaments, clumsily fashioned, but of pure gold and silver, were more to the taste of the ignorant conquerors, who were sceptical as to the value of the jewels. "Many of them," says Pedro Pizarro, whose rough, straightforward account of the discovery and conquest of Peru is frequently quoted by Mr Prescott, "had emeralds of great value; some tried them upon anvils, striking them with hammers, saying that if they were genuine, they would not break; others despised them, and affirmed that they were glass." A cunning monk, one of the missionaries whom Pizarro had been ordered by the