Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/455

Rh Ferdinand de Soto could no longer overawe or punish. His arrogance and his stubborn pride were now subdued by a gloomy melancholy, and his health began to decline under the conflict, with adversity and suffering. He was attacked by a malignant fever, during which he was neither cared-for nor visited as his state required. His little company had now melted away to three hundred men.

When he felt his death approach he called around him the remnant of his faithful followers, who obeyed him to the last, and named his successor.

The following day he died. His soldiers pronounced his eulogy by sorrowing for his loss. The priests cha u nted over his body the first requiem which was ever heard by the waters of the Mississippi. In order to conceal his death, they wrapped his body in a mantle, and, in the depth of night, bore him out upon the Mississippi and sank his body silently into the middle of the stream.

It was now again May, and the spring burst forth gloriously over the Mississippi, but De Soto rose up no more to meet it.

“The discoverer of the Mississippi,” adds the historian, to whom I am much indebted for the above, “slept beneath its waters. For four years he had wandered to and fro over a great portion of the continent in search of gold, but had found nothing so remarkable as the place of his burial.” Father Marquetta slumbered at the foot of the altar, without sickness and sorrow, after a life of peaceful conquest, and uninterrupted success; and Ferdinand de Soto, slowly dying amid morasses and adversities, his proud heart the prey of anxiety and of humiliation——what pictures they present! Has poetry anything brighter than the former, anything more gloomy than the latter?

December 21st.—The Mississippi flows grey, turbid, and