sently a footfall on the gravel, and outside the window a
hungry, pinched, anxious face looking nervously into the room. Then this
colloquy:

"Ah, the court, plague on't, I'd forgotten it."

"Adjourn it, gentlemen."

"Wine like yours, my lord, would make a man forget Paradise."

"Sit down again, gentlemen. Juan, go out and tell the people to come
back to-morrow."

"Your right good health, my lord!"

"And yours, gentlemen both!"

Oh, if there is any truth in religion, if this world is God's, if a day
is coming when the weak shall be exalted and the mighty laid low, what
a reckoning they have gone to whose people cried for bread and they gave
them a stone! And if there is not, if the hope is vain, if it is all a
sham and a mockery, still the justice of this world is sure. Where are
they now, these parasites? Their game is played out. They are bones and
ashes; they are in their forgotten graves.

THE STORY OF THE MANX PEOPLE

THE MANX LANGUAGE

A friend asked me the other day if there was any reason why I should not
deliver these lectures in Manx. I answered that there were just forty
good and sufficient reasons. The first was that I did not speak Manx.
Like the wise queen in the story of the bells, he then spared me the
recital of the remaining nine-and-thirty. But there is at least one of
the number that will appeal strongly to most of my hearers. What that
is you shall judge for yourselves after I have braved the pitfalls of
pronunciation in a tongue I do not know, and given you some clauses of
the Lord's Prayer in Manx.

Ayr ain t'ayns niait,
(Father our who art in heaven.)

Caskerick dy row dty ennym.
(Holy be Thy name.)

Dy jig dty reeriaght.
(Come Thy kingdom.)

Dty aigney dy row jeant er y thalloo mry te ayns niau.
(Thy will be done on the earth even as in heaven.)

*****

Son dy bragh, as dy bragh, Amen.
(For ever and ever. Amen.)

I asked a friend--it was Mr. Wilson Barrett--if in its fulness, its fine
chest-notes, its force and music, this old language did not sound like
Italian.

"Well, no," he answered, "it sounds more like hard swearing."

I think you must now understand why the greater part of these lectures
should be delivered in English.

Manx is a dialect mainly Celtic, and differing only slightly from the
ancient Scottish Gaelic. I have heard my father say that when he was
a boy in Ramsey, sixty years ago, a Scotch sh