From these ungracious thoughts let me turn again, in a last word, to the old island itself, the true Mannin-veg-Veen of the real Manxman. In these lectures you have seen it only as in flashes from a dark lantern. I am conscious that an historian would have told you so much more of solid fact that you might have carried away tangible ideas. Fact is not my domain, and I shall have to be content if in default of it I have got you close to that less palpable thing, the living heart of Manx-land, shown you our island, helped you to see its blue waters and to scent its golden gorse, and to know the Manxman from other men. Sometimes I have been half ashamed to ask you to look at our countrymen, so rude are they and so primitive--russet-coated, currane-shod men and women, untaught, superstitious, fishing the sea, tilling their stony land, playing next to no part in the world, and only gazing out on it as a mystery far away, whereof the rumour comes over the great waters. No great man among us, no great event in our history, nothing to make us memorable. But I have been re-assured when I have remembered that, after all, to look on a life so simple and natural might even be a tonic. Here we are in the heart of the mighty world, which the true Manxman knows only by vague report; millions on millions huddled together, enough to make five hundred Isles of Man, more than all the Manxmen that have lived since the days of Orry, more than all that now walk on the island, added to all that rest under it; streets on streets of us, parks on parks, living a life that has no touch of Nature in the ways of it; save only in our own breasts, which often rebel against our surroundings, struggling with weariness under their artificiality, and the wild travesty of what we are made for. Do what we will, and be what we may, sometimes we feel the falseness of our ways of life, and surely it is then a good and wholesome thing to go back in thought to such children of Nature as my homespun Manx people, and see them where Nature placed them, breathing the free air of God's proper world, and living the right lives of His servants, though so simple, poor, and rude. End of Project Gutenberg's The Little Manx Nation - 1891, by Hall Caine