CHAP.
X.]
CHRISTOPHER
COLUMBUS.
followers during their sojourn in the Vega.
379
Wherever they went
it was a continual scene of festivity and rejoicing. The natives hastened from all parts, bearing presents, and laying the treasures of their groves, and streams, and mountains, at the feet of beings whom they still considered as descended from the skies to bring blessings to their island. Having accomplished the purposes of his residence in the Vega, Columbus, at the end of a few days, took leave of its hos pitable inhabitants, and resumed his march for the harbor, return ing with his little army through the lofty and rugged gorge of the mountains called the Pass of the Hidalgos. As we accompany him in imagination over the rocky height, whence the Vega first broke upon the eye of the Europeans, we cannot help pausing to cast back a look of mingled pity and admiration over this beauti ful but devoted region.
The dream of natural liberty, of igno
rant content, and loitering idleness, was as yet unbroken, but the fiat had gone forth; the white man had penetrated into the land; avarice, and pride, and ambition, and pining care, and sordid labor, and withering poverty, were soon to follow, and the indolent para dise of the Indian was about to disappear for ever.