You will think this implies that Manxmen stick close to their island. They do more than that. I will tell you a story. Five years ago I went up into the mountains to seek an old Manx bard, last of a race of whom I shall have something to tell you in their turn. All his life he had been a poet. I did not gather that he had read any poetry except his own. Up to seventy he had been a bachelor. Then this good Boaz had lit on his Ruth and married, and had many children. I found him in a lonely glen, peopled only in story, and then by fairies. A bare hill side, not a bush in sight, a dead stretch of sea in front, rarely brightened by a sail. I had come through a blinding hail-storm. The old man was sitting in the chimney nook, a little red shawl round his head and knotted under his chin. Within this aureole his face was as strong as Savonarola's, long and gaunt, and with skin stretched over it like parchment. He was no hermit, but a farmer, and had lived on that land, man and boy, nearly ninety years. He had never been off the island, and had strange notions of the rest of the world. Talked of England, London, theatres, palaces, king's entertainments, evening parties. He saw them all through the mists of rumour, and by the light of his Bible. He had strange notions, some of them bad shots for the truth, some of them startlingly true. I dare not tell you what they were. A Royal Institution audience would be aghast. They had, as a whole, a strong smell of sulphur. But the old bard was not merely an islander, he belonged to his land more than his land belonged to him. The fishing town nearest to his farm was Peel, the great fishing centre on the west coast. It was only five miles away. I asked how long it was since he had been there? "Fifteen years," he answered. The next nearest town was the old capital, on the east coast, Castletown, the home of the Governor, of the last of the Manx lords, the place of the Castle, the Court, the prison, the garrison, the College. It was just six miles away. How long was it since he had been there? "Twenty years." The new capital, Douglas, the heart of the island, its point of touch with the world, was nine miles away. How long since he had been in Douglas? "Sixty years," said the old bard. God bless him, the sweet, dear old soul! Untaught, narrow, self-centred, bred on his byre like his bullocks, but keeping his soul alive for all that, caring not a ha'porth for the things of the world, he was a true Manxman, and I'm proud of him. One thing I have to thank him for. But for him, and the like of him, we should not be here to-day. It is not the cultured Manxman, the Manxman that goes to the ends of the earth, that makes the Manx nation valuable to study. Our race is what it is by virtue of the Manxman who has had no life outside Man, and so has kept alive our language, our customs, our laws and our patriarchal Constitution. OUR ISLAND