urer. "Not a grain of gold or silver has come from Virginia."
"The spot I ask." replied Ralph, "lies at the head of navigation of a broad river, and such I deem a fit place for a city. Then, too, just above is a goodly water-power, which I am resolved to make not only turn mills to grind grain, but to saw boards, turn lathes, and do much other work now done by man and beast."
The Treasurer thought the young man a visionary.
As Ralph was to take out a colony at his own expense, and as the Jamestown colony had already cost the Company many thousand pounds, the only return for which had been two or three cargoes of cedar-wood, and little prospect of a betterment, the Company were not loth to take fifteen hundred pounds sterling of good gold and give Ralph a grant in feesimple of the soil, waters, forests, and minerals (though they objected somewhat to this item), with the power of lieutenant-governor in the local government of the colony, the general government subordinate to the Virginia Council.
Ralph's scheme had by this time developed,
