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For my part, there isn't one of them bates the Manx itself for plainness. And aren't we reading, when the Lord wanted to bring confusion on Noah and his disobedient sons and grandsons at going up the Tower of Babel, he made them spake different tongues?" "Good thing too," snapped Cæsar, "if every poor man was bound to carry his wife up with him."
There was something in all her manner so extraordinary, joined to her sudden appearance, and her demeanour in the King's presence, so oddly, yet so well contrived to procure him a private audience which he might, by graver means, have sought in vain that it almost justified the idea, though he smiled at it internally, that the little mute agent was aided in her machinations by the kindred imps, to whom, according to Manx superstition, her genealogy was to be traced.
He read a Manx prayer-book to the poet's daughter at Kirk Onchan, and asked her a score of questions. He convinced one woman that he was "of the old Manx." Finding a Manxman who spoke French and thought it the better language, he made the statement that "Manx or something like it was spoken in France more than a thousand years before French."
But beneath this layer the native element may have remained potentially, if not actually, Celtic, and in the remoter districts the native speech may have lingered on, like Erse or Manx to-day, as a rival to the more fashionable Latin. How far this happened actually within the civilized lowland area we cannot tell.
What he saw did not spoil the visionary image, and his enthusiasm coupled with curiosity gives the book of his travels just the continuous impulse which he never found for his Cornish, Manx, Irish or Scottish notes. He was able to fill the book with sympathetic observation and genial self-revelation. The book is of course a tourist's book.
Yes, Manx Bradley, the admiral, was praying. And his prayer was remarkably brief, as well as earnest. Its request was that God would send help to the souls of the men whose home was the North Sea. For upwards of thirty years Manx and a few like-minded men had persistently put up that petition.
"She'll never see eight the longest day she lives." "No use decaiving the man," said the other dealer, speaking in Manx. "She's sixteen 'low she's nine, anyway." "Fair play, boys; spake English before a poor fellow," said Black Tom, with a snort. "This brother of mine lows she's seven," said the first of the two. "You thundering liar," said Black Tom in Manx. "He says she's sixteen."
"No, no!" "Yes, though, one of the first Manx estates going. Cæsar had the deeds, but I've been taking them to the High Bailiff, and doing everything regular. When I'm gone, sir " Philip tried to protest. "Aw, but a man can lave what he likes to his own, sir, can't he?" Philip was silent. He could say nothing. The make-believe was to be kept up to the last tragic moment.
Grammar is the appendenda vermiformis of pedagogics: it is as useless as the letter q in the alphabet, or as the proverbial two tails to a cat, which no cat ever had, and the finest cat in the world, the Manx cat, has no tail at all. "The literary style of most university men is commonplace, when not positively bad," wrote Herbert Spencer in his old age.
Then there were rules and regulations for visiting and calls; and they were announced to any young people who might be staying in the town, with all the solemnity with which the old Manx laws were read once a year on the Tinwald Mount. Then, after they had called
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