ip came ashore on the
Carrick, and next morning after the wreck a long, lank, bony creature,
with bare legs, and in short petticoats, came into the marketplace and
played a tune on a little shrieking pair of smithy bellows, and then
sang a song. It was a Highland piper, and he sang in his Gaelic, but the
Manx boys and girls who gathered round him understood almost every word
of his song, though they thought his pronunciation bad. Perhaps they
took him for a poor old Manxman, somehow strayed and lost, a sort of
Manx Rip Van Winkle who had slept a century in Scotland, and thereby
lost part of his clothes.

You will wonder that there is not more Norse in our language,
remembering how much of the Norse is in our blood. But the predominance
of the Celtic is quite natural. Our mothers were Celts, speaking Celtic,
before our Norse-fathers came. Was it likely that our Celtic mothers
should learn much of the tongue of their Norse husbands? Then, is it not
our mother, rather than our father, who teaches us to speak when we are
children? So our Celtic mothers taught us Celtic, and thus Celtic became
the dominant language of our race.

MANX NAMES

But though our Norse fathers could not impose their Norse tongue on
their children, they gave them Norse names, and to the island they
gave Norse place-names. Hence we find that though Manx names show
a preponderance of the Celtic, yet that the Norse are numerous and
important. Thus we have many _dales, fells, garths_, and _ghylls_.
Indeed, we have many pure Scandinavian surnames and place-names. When
I was in Iceland I sometimes found myself face to face with names which
almost persuaded me that I was at home in our little island of the Irish
Sea. There is, for example, a Snaefell in Man as well as in Iceland.
Then, our Norwegian surnames often took Celtic prefixes, such as _Mac_,
and thus became Scandio-Gaelic. But this is a subject on which I have
no right to speak with authority. You will find it written down with
learning and judgment in the good book of my friend Mr. A. W. Moore,
of Cronkbourne. What concerns me more than the scientific aspect of the
language is its literary character. I seem to realise that it was the
language of a poetic race. The early generations of a people are often
poetic. They are child-like, and to be like a child is the best half of
being like a poet. They name their places by help of their observatory
powers. These are fresh and full of wonder, and N