followed them, however, into the forest, while the Skrellings pursued her. She found a dead man in front of her; this was Thorbrand, Snorri's son, his skull cleft by a flat stone, his naked sword lay beside him ; she took it up and prepared to defend herself with it. The Skrellings then approached her, whereupon she stripped down her shift and slapped her breast with the naked sword. At this the Skrellings were terrified, and ran down to their boats and rowed away.'

In this encounter Karlsefni and his party lost two men. How many of the natives were slain is not known. According to one recension a 'great number' fell, but according to the other only four.

After this Karlsefni and his friends thought it no longer safe to remain where they were. They prepared, therefore, to leave and to return to their own country. Steering northward they found 'five Skrellings, clad in skin-doublets, lying asleep near the sea,' with vessels beside them containing animal marrow mixed with blood.' The Northmen concluded that the Skrellings must have been banished from their own land, and put them to death. Then, continuing their course, they 'found a cape, upon which there was a great number of animals, and the cape looked as if it were one cake of dung, by reason of the animals which lay there at night.' Shortly after they arrived at Stream-firth where they found great abundance of all those things of which they stood in need.' The next move seems to be uncertain, for the saga continues: 'Some men say that Biarni and Freydis remained behind here with a hundred men and went no further, while Karlsefni and Snorri proceeded to the southward with forty men, tarrying at Hóp barely two months, and returning again the same summer.' The story then continues: 'Karlsefni then set out with one ship in search of Thorhall the Huntsman, but the greater part of the company remained behind.' They sailed away northward round Keelness, and then bore away to the west, having the land to the larboard. Here the country was a wooded wilderness as far as they could see, with scarcely an open space.' After going a considerable distance they sailed into the mouth of a river flowing from the east toward the west,' and lay to by the southern bank. Here one morning, in an

6

open space in the woods above them, they saw a speck which seemed to shine towards them.' They shouted at it; it stirred, and it was a Uniped, who skipped down to the bank of the river by which they were lying. Thorvald, a son of Eric the Red, was sitting at the helm, and the Uniped shot an arrow into his inwards. Thorvald drew out the arrow

and died soon after from the wound.' The Uniped ran back to the north pursued by Karlsefni and his men, but they failed to overtake him. The last they saw of him he ran down into a creek.'

After this misfortune, the adventurers, fearing to risk their lives any longer, and concluding that the mountains near to which they were, formed one chain with the mountains of Hóp, sailed back to the North and spent the winter, the third since they had left Greenland, at Stream-firth. Then the men began to divide into factions, of which the women were the cause; and those who were without wives endeavoured to seize upon the wives of those who were married, whence the greatest trouble arose. Snorri, Karlsefni's son, was born the first autumn, and he was three winters old when they took their departure.' On their return voyage 'they sailed away from Wineland' with a southerly wind, and so came upon Markland,' Here they found five Skrellings; one was bearded, two were women, and two were boys. The boys they captured. Their mother's name, they said, was Vætilldi, and their father's Uvægi. They said that kings governed the land of the Skrellings, one of whom was called Avalldamon, and the other Valldidida.' 'They stated that there were no houses there, and that the people lived in caves or holes. They said that there was a land on the other side over against their country, which was inhabited by people who wore white garments and yelled loudly, and carried poles before them, to which rags were attached, and people believed that Whitemen's Land. Now they arrived in Greenland, and remained during the winter with Eric the Red.' Biarni seems to have parted company with Karlsefni, for the Saga goes on to relate how he was driven out into the Atlantic,' and came into a sea which was filled with worms. Here, we are told

he and half of his companions perished, in consequence of their ship becoming worm-eaten and unseaworthy, while the rest managed to escape in a boat coated with seal-tar, a substance which the sea-worm, it appears, does not penetrate.

The story contained in the Flatey Book, as already mentioned, is in some respects different. One or two points have already been noticed. There are others. Here the first discovery is attributed not to Leif Ericsson, but to Biarni Heriulfsson. Biarni, it is said, was driven to the southward out of his course when voyaging from Iceland to Greenland, and thus came upon unknown lands, and as the direct result of his reports, Leif Ericsson is said to have been moved to go in search of the lands Biarni had seen, but not explored. He found them in due course, the Saga says, 'first the land which Biarni had seen last, and finally the southermost land,' to which, after its products,' he gave the name of Wineland. Over against this, however, must be put the historical accounts as well as those of the Western Sagas, all of which agree in attributing the original discovery to Leif, and under precisely the same circumstances. Further, not only is Biarni's discovery unknown in any other Icelandic writing now existing, no other mention of Biarni himself is to be found, notwithstanding that his father is said to have been a most distinguished man,' the grandson of a 'settler' and a kinsman of the first Icelandic colonist. Moreover, the discovery is antedated by about fifteen years, and Leif's voyage thrown forward to the year 1002. Eric the Red, again, is said to have died before Christianity was introduced into Greenland, whereas according to the historical statements, it was introduced before his death. Leif, again, is made to sail on his errand from Olaf Tryggvason, the year after Olaf was slain. The chronology of the Saga, in fact, is all awry. Some of its statements of fact are also wrong; for instance, Runolf, the father of Bishop Thorlak, is said to have been the son of Hallfrid the daughter of Snorri, Karlsefni's Wineland-born son, whereas he was Hallfrid's husband. Some of the incidents, as already stated, are also different from those of the Western recensions, but for these we must refer the reader to Mr. Reeves' volume. These diver

gencies, however, it must be noted, do not militate against the fact of the discovery. At most they simply make a show of telling against the veracity of the Sagas on points of secondary importance.

One other point deserves to be mentioned. The news of the discovery was not confined to the Northmen. It was made known to foreigners by the prebendary Adam of Bremen, as early as the year 1076. In his work entitled Descriptio insularum aquilonis, the materials for which he obtained during a sojourn at the Court of the Danish king Svend Estridsson, and which he appears to have completed in the year just mentioned, he writes: 'Moreover he spoke of an island in that ocean discovered by many, which is called Wineland, for the reason that vines grow wild there, which yield the best of wine. Moreover, that grain unsown grows there abundantly, is not a fabulous fancy, but, from the accounts of the Danes, we know it to be a fact. Beyond this island, it is said, there is no habitable land, but all the regions which are beyond are filled with insupportable ice and boundless gloom, to which Martian thus refers: "One day's sail beyond Thile the sea is frozen." This was essayed not long since by that very enterprising Northmen's prince, Harold, who explored the extent of the northern ocean with his ships, but was scarcely able by retreating to escape in safety from the gulf's enormous abyss, where, before his eyes, the vanishing bounds of earth were hidden in gloom.' Whether Columbus was acquainted with Adam's Description before he sailed on his famous voyage is uncertain. It is possible that he was, but the probability is he was not.

ART. V.-BEGINNINGS OF THE SCOTTISH NEWSPAPER PRESS.

IN

the Advocates' Library, Edinburgh, are two or three small quarto volumes containing all, probably, that the Scottish capital possesses of the news-sheets which enlightened the burghers of Auld Reekie,' and informed an alien soldiery during the

Cromwellian era. They are scattered numbers, as if collected by one who thought of posterity when it was almost too late, and are bound up with a few pages of faded chirography, decipherable only by an expert, and numerous controversial pamphlets and polemical tracts—the foam on the sea of that stormy period, and, like the foam, effectual neither in helping nor retarding the advancing waves. Turning over those age-bedimmed sheets in the seclusion and monastic gloom-beloved of students!—that dwell beneath the Parliament House, one may recall the circumstances under which they were produced-the bustle in the camp when a messenger arrives with despatches from the Parliament; the eagerness of Kit Higgins' 'devil' as he catches the packet of London Diurnals flung to him by the now dismounted horseman ; the sharp click of types in the printing-house' over against the Tron-Church,' as 'stick' by 'stick,' and column by column the papers are reproduced; the hurried making up of formes and their final deposition on the bed of the press; the aforesaid 'devil' daubing on the ink, and the sinewy pressman snapping down the tympan' and jerking the 'chill' with a strength that has left a matrix of the letters in the time-worn paper even unto this day! Then behold the distribution of the damp sheets, first to the English soldiery, and afterwards to the coffee-houses of the town, where the citizens most did congregate, each man an arsenal of offensive and defensive weapons, for the cautious Scot, it is said, did not abandon the use of armour until the year of grace 1710.

In 1536 the first Gazetta of Venice, a little manuscript sheet, was read to a group privileged to hear its contents, on payment of the coin which gave its name to the paper, and in that act christened many generations of long and short-lived publications. A few years later England saw the modest beginnings of a journalism that, in despite of press censorship and Star Chamber ordinance, was fostered by the indefatigable Nathaniel Butter, and developed in the more relaxed times of the Commonwealth, when Milton's Areopagitica anticipated the complete freedom of a later day. But it was not until 1652 that Scotland had any record of public affairs printed within her borders, and then the newspapers issued by Christopher Higgins, mainly for the infor