It was spoken in parts of East Friesland as late as the middle of the last century--but only in parts; the Low German, or Platt-Deutsch, being the current tongue of the districts around. It is spoken--as already stated--in Heligoland. And, lastly, it is spoken in an isolated locality as far north as the Duchy of Sleswick, in the neighbourhood of Husum and Bredsted. It was these Frisians of Sleswick who alone, during the late struggle of Denmark against Germany, looked upon the contest with the same indifference as the frogs viewed the battles of the oxen. They were not Germans to favour the aggressors from the South, nor Danes to feel the patriotism of the Northmen. They were neither one nor the other--simply Frisians, members of an isolated and disconnected brotherhood. The epithet _free_ originated with the Frisians of Friesland Proper, and it has adhered to them. With their language they have preserved many of their old laws and privileges, and from first to last, have always contrived that the authority of the sovereigns of the Netherlands should sit lightly on them. Nevertheless, they are a broken and disjointed population; inasmuch, as the natural inference from their present distribution is the doctrine that, at some earlier period, they were spread over the whole of the sea-coast from Holland to Jutland, in other words, that they were the oldest inhabitants of Friesland, Oldenburg, Lower Hanover, and Holstein. If so, they must have been the _Frisii_ of Tacitus. No one doubts this. They must also have been the _Chauci_ of that writer, the German form of whose names, as we know from the oldest Anglo-Saxon poems, was _Hocing_. This is not so universally admitted; nevertheless, it is difficult to say who the Chauci were if they were not Frisians, or why we find Frisians to the north of the Elbe, unless the population was at one time continuous.