One day when seated on the beach, both mother and daughter silently watched the waves as they came in gentle ripples almost to their feet. Amy awoke from her reverie, exclaiming: "Oh, it is so beautiful!" She had been reading of the early explorers of our country, the self-sacrificing missionaries who crossed this same boundless ocean, which now lay so calm before them. Amy went on musingly, as if talking to herself, such a softness had come into her voice--her eyes took a dreamy far-off look, as though it were fresh in her mind--the story of the gallant De Soto and his brave company of six hundred men, the flower of Spanish chivalry, leaving the sunny slopes of his native Estramadura, sailing across these unknown seas, and landing upon these western shores; day after day pressing on through pathless wilds, on towards the sunset, in pursuit of that fabled El Dorado in which they thoroughly believed. And then that sad death upon the banks of the river which his eyes first of all Europeans had beheld--the sorrowing band who resolved to hide his body in the waters--the little skiff, in the gloom of the soft summer night, pushing silently out from the shadowy shore, with oars muffled and voices hushed, for fear of the savage arrows hidden among the dark vines--the dull sound as they dropped the body in mid-river, and the sweet, sad music as the priest sang low the requiem of the departed chief--the first requiem that had ever sounded upon those solitary shores, where the waves have for four hundred years chanted their long dirge over the man whose prowess first gave them to the world.