At various points of my narrative I have touched on certain of our eccentric Manx "characters." But perhaps more interesting than any such whom I have myself met with are some whom I have known only by repute. These children of Nature are after all the truest touchstones of a nation's genius. Crooked, distorted, deformed, they nevertheless, and perhaps therefore, show clearly the bent of their race. If you are without brake or curb you may be blind, but you must know when you are going down hill. The curb of education, and the brake of common-sense are the surest checks on a people's individuality. And these poor halfwits of the Manx race, wiser withal than many of the Malvolios who smile on them so demurely, exhibit the two great racial qualities of the Manx people--the Celtic and the Norse--in vivid companionship and contrast. It is an amusing fact that in some wild way the bardic spirit breaks out in all of them. They are all singers, either of their own songs, or the songs of others. That surely is the Celtic strain in them. But their songs are never of the joys of earth or of love, or yet of war; never, like the rustic poetry of the Scotch, full of pawky humour; never cynical, never sarcastic; only concerned with the terrors of judgment and damnation and the place of torment. That, also, may be a fierce and dark development of the Celtic strain, but I see more of the Norse spirit in it. When my ancient bard in Glen Rushen took down his thumb-marked, greasy, discoloured poems from the "lath" against the open-timbered ceiling, and read them aloud to me in his broad Manx dialect, with a sing-song of voice and a swinging motion of body, while the loud hailstorm pelted the window pane and the wind whistled round the house, I found they were all startling and almost ghastly appeals to the sinner to shun his evil courses. One of them ran like this: HELL IS HOT. O sinner, see your dangerous state, And think of hell ere 'tis too late; When worldly cares would drown each thought, Pray call to mind that hell is hot. Still to increase your godly fears, Let this be sounding in your ears, Still bear in mind that hell is hot, Remember and forget it not. There was another poem about a congregation of the dead in the region of the damned: I found a reverend parson there, A congregation too, Bowed on their bended knees at prayer, As they were wont to do. But soon my heart was struck with pain, I thought it truly odd, The parson's prayer did not contain A word concerning God. You will remember the Danish book called "Letters from Hell," containing exactly the same idea, and conclude that the Manx bard was poking fun at some fashionable yet worldly-minded preacher. But no; he was too much a child of Nature for that.