Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/199

 discoverers of Vinland in the 11th century." The bait took; and no doubt these comical fellows at Newport are chuckling in their club-room at seeing their "old stone mill" figuring in the Annals of the Northern Antiquarian Society, with arches and pillars like a Grecian temple. It is only when one comes, compass in hand, to a scale of feet and inches, that one finds this magnificent structure, with pillars and arches, and of which an exterior and interior view is given in the Annals of the Antiquarian Society of Copenhagen, is in reality the bottom of a mill of the very ordinary size of 18 feet within walls, standing on pillars 6 or 7 feet high and 5 or 6 feet apart, and arched over,—like to and on the scale of the pillars and arches of a cart-shed, or a horse-course of a thrashing-mill, instead of a structure, as the plates, of which no less than three are given, would lead you to believe, on the plan of the Coliseum, and of the size of the Temple of Vesta. This is very amusing; but it is not quite so amusing to have to pay heavy prices for magnificent books, got up in two or three languages, superb in size, paper, and type, decorated with fac-simile specimens of the writing of illuminated beautifully executed saga manuscripts, illustrated with splendid copper-plates, and published in the name and under the auspices of a great and learned antiquarian society; and to find you have been paying gold for such oldwifery as this Deighton writing rock and Newport old stone mill. It would, in fact, be difficult to point out any fact or observation of value relative to the discovery of Vinland which has not been brought to light and weighed by Torfieus, in 1707, in his little tract on Vinland. Torfæus was an antiquary of great judgment. He came first into the field, and seized upon the only fact with respect to the discovery of Vinland that there was to seize upon—the docu mentary proof, from a manuscript of fixed date, of a