European Hero Stories #255242

I have sometimes wondered if every one realized how startlingly independent and isolated a historical fact is to a child. It has happened before his remembrance, and that alone is enough to put it into another world. It is outside of his own little experience. It has appeared to him by no familiar road, but from the un known regions of space. This is especially true in the study of the history of our own country. The wide expanse of the Atlantic Ocean on the map, the tale of the long voyage that preceded the discovery or the settlement, remove it from the European back ground which to older readers gives reality to the account of the beginnings and progress of civilization in the New World.