So when the Englishman calls himself, with swelling pride, a Briton, he speaks wide of the mark. The Keltic Briton was buried fathoms deep under seven centuries of Saxon rule, and then, to make the extinction more complete, was overlaid with this brilliant lacquer of Norman surface. And if that mixed product, the English people, have any race paternity, it is Teutonic, and herein may lie the impossibility of making the English and Irish a homogeneous people--the English Teuton and Irish Kelt being in the nature of things antagonistic, the particles refuse to combine chemically, and can only be brought together (to use the language of the chemist) in mechanical mixture. CHAPTER IV. Among the German tribes it was the Goths who had first come under the civilizing influence of the Christian religion. As some winged seed is wafted from a fair garden into a dark, distant forest, and there takes root and blossoms, so was the seed-germ of Christianity caught by the wind of destiny, and carried from Palestine to the heart of pagan Germany, where, strange to say, it found congenial soil. The story is a romantic one. A Christian boy in Asia Minor, while straying on the shores of the Mediterranean, was captured by some Goths, who took their fair-haired prize home to their own land, and named him Ulfilas. The boy, with his heart all aflame for the religion in which he had been nurtured, told his captors the story of Calvary--of Christ and his gospel of peace and love; and lived to see the terrible sacrificial altars replaced by the Cross. The Goths had no alphabet, so Ulfilas invented one, and then translated the Bible into their rude speech. A part of this translation is now preserved in Sweden and is the earliest extant specimen of the Gothic language. This Gothic version of the Lord's Prayer, written by Ulfilas more than fifteen centuries ago, bears such close resemblance to the German and English versions that it can be easily read by us to-day; and makes us realize our own near kinship to those simple barbarians of the fourth century. In the year 375, thirty-five years before the sacking of Rome, from the vast plains lying between Russia and China there had poured into Europe a terrible race of beings called Huns. They seemed more like demons than men. Insensible alike to fear, to hunger, thirst, or cold, they appeased their ferocious appetites upon wild roots and raw meat. These hideous men ate, drank, and slept on horseback, their no less hideous wives and children following them in wagons, as they ravaged through the Continent of Europe. The Huns, under the leadership of Attila, swept everything before them; leaving a track of blood and ashes through Germany.