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 tory, related by the Spanish historians themselves, it is so completely an assumption of the art of the "father of lies," and betrays such a consciousness of the real nature of the business they were engaged in, that it would be looked upon as a happy burlesque of some waggish wit upon them. The fact however stands on the authority of Gomera, Herrera, Oviedo, and others. Ovando, the governor, seeing the rapidly wasting numbers of the natives, and hearing the complaints of the adventurers, began to cast about for a remedy, and at length this most felicitous scheme, worthy of Satan in the brightest moment of his existence, burst upon him.—There were the inhabitants of the Lucayo Isles, living in heathen idleness, and ignorant alike of Christian mines and Christian sugar-works. It was fitting that they should not be left in such criminal and damnable neglect any longer. He proposed, therefore, that these benighted creatures should be brought to the elysium of Hispaniola, and civilized in the gold mines, and instructed in the Christian religion in the sugar-mills! The idea was too happy, and too full of the milk of Christian kindness to be lost. At once, all the amiable gold-hunters clapped their hands with ecstasy at the prospect of so many new martyrs to the Christian faith; and Ferdinand, the benevolent and most Catholic Ferdinand, assented to it with the zeal of a royal nursing father of the church! A fleet was speedily fitted out for the benighted Lucayos; and the poor inhabitants there, wasting their existence in merely cultivating their maize, plucking their oranges, or fishing in their streams, just as their need or their inclination prompted them, were told by the Spaniards that they came from the heaven of their