lish navigator had seen the vast volume of fresh water poured down by the St. Lawrence, which any schoolboy should have known could be drained only from a great continent. The Indians in the vicinity of the first English settlement at Roanoke, seeing the Englishmen very desirous of finding two things: gold and the South Sea, told them, with the design of sending them off on a wild-goose chase from which they might never return, that Roanoke River rose in a region full of gold; and that its source was a fountain so near the South Sea that the spray of the ocean dashed into the fountain. And this story was believed in England. So many wonders had been found in the new world that it seemed not incredible that a river should rise a few rods from the Pacific and flow into the Atlantic; or that a vast stream of fresh water could flow with a strong current from one salt sea into another.
The boundaries asked for by Morton were granted, with the proviso that if the crest of the main range of mountains was not a hundred and fifty miles from the Atlantic, then the eastern boundary of Aristopia should be a line parallel with the Atlantic coast and one hundred and fifty miles from it.
