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The Celts, however, did not exterminate the whole Euskarian people; they were too few in number and too far advanced in civilisation for such a course. They knew it was better to make them slaves than to destroy them: for the Celts had just reached, but had not yet got beyond, the slave-making stage of culture.
Then, she remembered the letters of her old father, now decomposed in the profound earth, under a slab of granite, near the foundations of his parish church those letters in Euskarian tongue which he wrote to her, after the first months of indignation and of silence, in the city where she had dragged her fault.
Thus, at the time when Britain comes forth into the full historic glare of Roman civilisation, we find the country inhabited by a Celtic aristocracy of Aryan type round-headed, fair-haired, and blue-eyed; together-with a plebs of Celticised Euskarian or half-caste serfs, retaining, as they still retain, the long skulls and dark complexions of their aboriginal ancestors.
The Xanthochroi, who thus came into contact with the Western Melanochroi, spoke a Celtic language; and that Celtic language, whether Cymric or Gaelic, spread over the Melanochroi far beyond the limits of intermixture of blood, supplanting Euskarian, just as English and French, have supplanted Celtic.
Even as early as Caesar's time, I suppose that the Euskarian was everywhere, except in Spain and in Aquitaine, replaced by Celtic, and thus the Celtic speakers were no longer of one ethnological stock, but of two. Both in Western Europe and in England a third wave of language in the one case Latin, in the other Teutonic has spread over the same area.
Very far from all human habitation, in a corner of a ravine, where it was warmer than elsewhere, sheltered from all breezes, they met a peddler of holy images, who was wiping his forehead. He had set down his basket, full of those colored prints with gilt frames that represent saints with Euskarian legends, and with which the Basques like to adorn their old rooms with white walls.
The song told, in monotonous couplets, the complaint of a linen weaver whose lover in a distant war prolonged his absence. It was written in that mysterious Euskarian language, the age of which seems incalculable and the origin of which remains unknown.
If so, there may have been petty Euskarian principalities, rude supremacies or chieftainships like those of South Africa, in the Chichester lowlands, in the dale of Arun, in the valleys of the Adur, the Ouse, and the Cuckmere River, and perhaps, too, in the insulated Hastings region, between the Pevensey levels and the Romney marsh.
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