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And when he saw Gudrid he loved her and sought her in marriage, and Leif giving his consent to it, Thorfinn and Gudrid were married. At this time many people still talked of the voyages to Vineland, and they urged Thorfinn to journey thither and seek to find out more about these strange lands. And more than all the others Gudrid urged him to go.
There was no lack of food either for man or beast, and the cattle they had brought with them roamed at will, and fed upon the wide prairie lands. All winter and spring the Norsemen dwelt in Vineland, and they saw no human beings save themselves. Then one day in early summer they saw a great troop of natives come out of the wood.
Labrador will never be a "vineland," a land of corn and wine, or a country where fenced cities will be needed to keep out the milk and honey. But though there may be other sections of the Empire that can produce more dollars, Labrador will, like Norway and Sweden, produce Vikings, and it is said that the man behind the gun is still of some moment.
D., of the Vineland, N. J., Training School, being authority for the latter statement. Only 34,137 of these unfortunates were under institutional care in the United States in 1916, the rest being free to propagate their kind piling up public burdens for future generations. The feebleminded are notoriously prolific in reproduction.
However this may be, there is at least a probability that the Vikings discovered North America five centuries before Columbus. The saga of Eric the Red sings of the deeds of Leif Ericson, who led the discoverers and named the three new countries Helluland, Markland, and Vineland.
The Vineland colony seems to have prospered well enough, but unfortunately quarrels broke out between the Norsemen and the savages, and so many of Karlsevne's people were killed that the remainder were glad to sail back to Greenland.
And the encounter seemed and was the most natural thing in the world. She did not stop to ask herself why it was so fitting that the Viking should be a part of Vineland: why his coming should have given it the one and final needful touch. For that designation of Reginald Farwell's had come back to her.
Most of these have improved their condition in life materially by settling there. Many of them came without sufficient capital, and no doubt suffered from want in the early days of their Vineland life. But if they persevered, two or three years of effort made them comfortable.
As they brought timber, much prized in the Greenland settlement, their voyage caused a great deal of talk. Naturally others wished to rival Leif. In the next few years several voyages to Vineland are briefly chronicled in the sagas. First of all, Thorwald, Leif's brother, borrowed his ship, sailed away to Vineland with thirty men, and spent two winters there.
The chronicle says that the winter days were longer in Vineland than in Greenland, and names the exact length of the shortest day. Unfortunately, however, the Norsemen had no accurate system for measuring time; otherwise the length of the shortest winter day would enable us to know at what exact spot Leif's settlement was made.
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