On the next morning, the first of May, they found themselves off the mouth of a great river.  Riding at anchor on a sunny sea, they lowered their boats, crossed the bar that obstructed the entrance, and floated on a basin of deep and sheltered water, alive with leaping fish.  Indians were running along the beach and out upon the sand-bars, beckoning them to land.  They pushed their boats ashore and disembarked,—­sailors, soldiers, and eager young nobles.  Corslet and morion, arquebuse and halberd flashed in the sun that flickered through innumerable leaves, as, kneeling on the ground, they gave thanks to God who had guided their voyage to an issue full of promise.  The Indians, seated gravely under the neighboring trees, looked on in silent respect, thinking that they worshipped the sun.  They were in full paint, in honor of the occasion, and in a most friendly mood.  With their squaws and children, they presently drew near, and, strewing the earth with laurel-boughs, sat down among the Frenchmen.  The latter were much pleased with them, and Ribaut gave the chief, whom he calls the king, a robe of blue cloth, worked in yellow with the regal fleur-de-lis.

But Ribaut and his followers, just escaped from the dull prison of their ships, were intent on admiring the wild scenes around them.  Never had they known a fairer May-Day.  The quaint old narrative is exuberant with delight.  The quiet air, the warm sun, woods fresh with young verdure, meadows bright with flowers; the palm, the cypress, the pine, the magnolia; the grazing deer; herons, curlews, bitterns, woodcock, and unknown water-fowl that waded in the ripple of the beach; cedars bearded from crown to root with long gray moss; huge oaks smothering in the serpent folds of enormous grape-vines:  such were the objects that greeted them in their roamings, till their new-found land seemed “the fairest, fruitfullest, and pleasantest of al the world.”

They found a tree covered with caterpillars, and hereupon the ancient black-letter says,—­“Also there be Silke wormes in meruielous number, a great deale fairer and better then be our silk wormes.  To bee short, it is a thing vnspeakable to consider the thinges that bee seene there, and shalbe founde more and more in this incomperable lande.”

Above all, it was plain to their excited fancy that the country was rich in gold and silver, turquoises and pearls.  One of the latter, “as great as an Acorne at ye least,” hung from the neck of an Indian who stood near their boats as they reembarked.  They gathered, too, from the signs of their savage visitors, that the wonderful land of Cibola, with its seven cities and its untold riches, was distant but twenty days’ journey by water.  In truth, it was on the Gila, two thousand miles off, and its wealth a fable.

They named the river the River of May,—­it is now the St. John’s,—­and on its southern shore, near its mouth, planted a stone pillar graven with the arms of France.  Then, once more embarked, they held their course northward, happy in that benign decree which locks from mortal eyes the secrets of the future.