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Rh similar cards he may put his stake on each and draw on them separately, receiving or paying according as he stands successfully or overdraws, but the two cards must be similar, i.e. he cannot draw on both a knave and a queen, or a king and a ten, though their values are equal for the purpose of counting. A natural drawn in this way, however, only counts as 21, and does not turn out the dealer. Similarly a player may draw on three cards, or even four, should they be dealt him. A player who overdraws on one of such cards must declare and pay immediately, even though he stands on another. After a hand is played, the "pone" (Latin for " behind")—the player on the dealer's right—collects and shuffles the cards played, the dealer dealing from the remainder of the pack, till it is exhausted, when he takes the cards the pone holds, after the pone has cut them. It is a great advantage to deal, as the dealer receives from all who have already withdrawn, even if he overdraws himself.

 VINITA, a city and the county-seat of Craig county, Oklahoma, U.S.A., in the N.E. part of the state, about 135 m. E.N.E. of Guthrie. Pop. (1900) 2339; (1907) 3157, including 624 Indians and 479 negroes; (1910) 4082. Vinita is served by the Missouri, Kansas & Texas and the St Louis & San Francisco railways. In the city are the Sacred Heart Institute (Roman Catholic), and a hospital for masons. Vinita is situated in an agricultural and stock-raising region, and lead, zinc, oil and natural gas are found in the vicinity; the city's water supply is obtained from artesian wells. Bricks are manufactured. The first settlement was made here in 1870 and Vinita was chartered as a city in 1898.

 VINLAND (Old Norse, Vinland, i.e. Vineland or Wineland), some region on the eastern coast of North America, visited and named by the Norsemen in the beginning of the 11th century. The word first appeared in print in Adam of Bremen's Descriptio Insularum Aquilonis, an appendix to his Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum, published by Lindenbrog in 1595. In pursuit of historical study, Adam visited the Danish court during the reign of the well-informed monarch Svend Estridsson (1047–1076), and writes that the king "spoke of an island (or country) in that ocean discovered by many, which is called Vinland, because of the wild grapes [vites] that grow there, out of which a very good wine can be made. Moreover, that grain unsown grows there abundantly [fruges ibi non seminatas abundare] is not a fabulous fancy, but is based on trustworthy accounts of the Danes." This passage offers important corroboration of the Icelandic accounts of the Vinland voyages, and is, furthermore, interesting "as the only undoubted reference to Vinland in a medieval book written beyond the limits of the Scandinavian world" (Fiske). Adam's information concerning Vinland did not, however, impress his medieval readers, as he placed the new land somewhere in the Arctic regions: "All those regions which are beyond are filled with insupportable ice and boundless gloom." These words show the futility of ascribing to Adam's account Columbus's knowledge of lands in the West, as many overzealous advocates of the Norse discoveries have done. The importance of the information, meagre as it is, lies in the fact that Adam received from the lips of kinsmen of the explorers (as the Danes in a sense were) certain characteristic facts (the finding of grapes and unsown grain) that support the general reliability of the Icelandic sagas which tell of the Vinland voyages (in which these same facts are prominent), but which were not put into writing by the Norsemen until later—just how much later it is not possible to determine. The fact that the Icelandic sagas concerning Vinland are not contemporaneous written records has caused them to be viewed by many with suspicion; hence such a significant allusion as that by Adam of Bremen is not to be overlooked. To the student of the Norse sources, Adam's reference is not so important, as the internal evidence of the sagas is such as to give easy credence to them as records of exploration in regions previously unknown to civilization. The contact with savages would alone prove that.

During the middle ages the Scandinavians were the first to revive geographical science and to practise pelagic navigation. For six centuries previous to about 800, European interest in practical geographical expansion was at a standstill. During the 6th and 7th centuries, Irish anchorites, in their "passion for solitude," found their way to the Hebrides, Orkneys, Shetlands, Faroes and Iceland, but they were not interested in colonization or geographical knowledge. The discovery of new lands in the West by the Norsemen came in the course of the great Scandinavian exodus of the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries—the Viking Age—when Norsemen, Swedes and Danes swarmed over all Europe, conquering kingdoms and founding colonies. The main stream of Norsemen took a westerly course, striking Great Britain, Ireland and the Western Isles, and ultimately reached Iceland (in 874), Greenland (in 983) and Vinland (in 1000). This western migration was due mainly to political dissatisfaction in Norway, doubtless augmented by a restless spirit of adventure. The chiefs and their followers that settled Iceland were "picked men," the flower of the land, and sought a new home from other motives than want or gain. They sought political freedom. In Iceland they lived active, not to say tumultuous, lives, and left fine literary records of their doings and achievements. The Icelandic colony was an interesting forerunner of the American republic, having a prosperous population living under a republican government, and maintaining an independent national spirit for nearly four centuries.

Geographically Iceland belongs to America, and its colonization meant, sooner or later, the finding of other lands to the West. A century later Greenland was peopled from Iceland, and a colony existed for over four hundred years, when it was snuffed out, doubtless by hostile Eskimos. Icelandic records, among them the Vinland sagas, also a Norwegian work of the 13th century, called Speculum regale (The King's Mirror), and some papal letters, give interesting glimpses of the life of this colony. It was from the young Greenland colony that an attempt was made to establish a new outpost in Vinland, but plans for permanent settlement were given up on account of the hostility of the natives, with whom the settlers felt powerless to grapple. Gunpowder had not yet been invented.

Icelandic literature consists mainly of the so-called "sagas," or prose narratives, and is rich in historical lore. In the case of the Vinland sagas, however, there are two independent narratives of the same events, which clash in the record of details. Modern investigators have been interested in establishing the superiority of one over the other of the two narratives. One of them is the "Saga of Eric the Red" as found in the collection known as Hauk's Book, so called because the manuscript was made by Hauk Erlendsson, an Icelander who spent much of his life in Norway. It was copied, in part by Hauk himself, between