For the whole time one is either among the Basque people or their neighbours a little to the south, who are sufficiently similar to them to be almost indistinguishable. THE BASQUES The Basque people, when unmixed, are a fair people in face and hair, and they are generally regarded as the survivors of the Iberian race which in primitive times occupied Western Europe from Spain to Ireland. Everywhere else they appear to have been absorbed by other races, and by many who have studied the subject have been looked upon as a part of the stock of the modern English, Irish, and Welsh. Their language is of the agglutinative order, and has been called the despair of philologists, the difficulty of discovering how many of the Basque words have not been assimilated from other tongues being almost insurmountable. Of the religion of the ancient Basques Dr. Webster declares that no signs remain, their country being without burial tumuli or standing stones, although in the neighbouring areas the tumuli are thickly sown. The early Christian missionaries speak of idols, but no one knows what these were. Although a Roman road penetrates the heart of their country, the Basques were very gradually Christianized, while the Celts, on the contrary, were very susceptible to the new teaching from the East. The Basques now hold to Roman Catholicism with firmness, and are an industrious, hospitable, and very courteous people, and are not given to excess or extravagance. They also differ from the city-loving Celts, according to Mommsen, in their love of the country. They delight in scattered habitations, and many of the Basque villages have scarcely anything that can be called a street. When they emigrate, it is to South rather than to North America, the Pampas life seeming to attract rather than to repel them. ‘In forty-eight hours after their arrival,’ said a French chargé d’affaires at Montevideo, ‘you will find not a Basque in the town.’ It is very interesting, too, that in South America the dolichocephalic Basques are always regarded as distinct from Spaniards and Frenchmen, the brand of their race being deeper than the superficial signs of their nationality!