The bard, clad in rubber boots, old trousers, and a fisherman's jersey, had little of the "Scots Wha Ha'e" about him. But he was the real thing. He had journeyed to the competition on foot and there recited in Gaelic his own composition, a description of his life in Germany as a soldier in the British Army of the Rhine. "I sung of those queer foreign sights and people," he said. I asked him if he had liked the Germans. "I did not," he said. He was not a particularly loquacious bard. But he was intensely and unostentatiously devoted to customs and a culture well established before there were white men in America. The bard was proud of his association with an old and famous race. But, then, all over the British Isles there are groups rejoicing in the same fierce local pride. In Devon you will be told that it was "Devon men" who slashed the Armada to ruins in the Channel. That battle was fought nearly four hundred years ago. In a future century the visitor to London will be told, quite correctly, that it was the near-sighted, snaggle-toothed, weak-chested youngsters from the back streets who held the Germans at Calais until preparation could be made for the evacuation at Dunkirk. The British often act and talk like an old people because they _are_ an old people. Nearly nine hundred years have passed since the Norman invasion, the last great influx of foreign blood. Before that, wide, deep rivers and the absence of natural fortifications near the coast had invited invasion. Celts, Romans, Saxons, and Danes had mingled their blood with that of the ancient Britons. But major invasions ended with 1066. Consequently, the British are unused to foreigners in large numbers. They make a tremendous fuss over the forty thousand or so Jamaicans and other West Indian Negroes who have settled in the country since 1952. The two hundred thousand Poles and other East European refugees, many of whom fought valiantly beside the British in World War II, are more acceptable. This is true, also, of the Hungarians driven from their homeland by the savage Russian repression of the insurrection of 1956. But you will hear grumbling about "foreigners" in areas where refugees have settled. In rural areas you will also hear someone from a neighboring county, long settled in the village, referred to as a "foreigner." The Republic of Ireland is the main source of immigrants at present. No one knows the exact figures, for there is no official check, but it is estimated in Dublin that perhaps fifty thousand young Irishmen and Irishwomen have entered Britain in each recent year. This migration has raised some new economic, social, and religious problems and revived some old ones. It is also beginning to affect, although as yet very slightly, political balances in the western Midlands, for this area is short of labor and its industries gobble up willing young men from across the Irish Sea.