XIV. A GOSSIP ON A NOVEL OF DUMAS'S
XV. A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE
XVI. A HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE




CHAPTER I. THE FOREIGNER AT HOME


"This is no my ain house;
I ken by the biggin' o't."

Two recent books (1) one by Mr. Grant White on England, one on
France by the diabolically clever Mr. Hillebrand, may well have set
people thinking on the divisions of races and nations. Such
thoughts should arise with particular congruity and force to
inhabitants of that United Kingdom, peopled from so many different
stocks, babbling so many different dialects, and offering in its
extent such singular contrasts, from the busiest over-population to
the unkindliest desert, from the Black Country to the Moor of
Rannoch. It is not only when we cross the seas that we go abroad;
there are foreign parts of England; and the race that has conquered
so wide an empire has not yet managed to assimilate the islands
whence she sprang. Ireland, Wales, and the Scottish mountains
still cling, in part, to their old Gaelic speech. It was but the
other day that English triumphed in Cornwall, and they still show
in Mousehole, on St. Michael's Bay, the house of the last Cornish-
speaking woman. English itself, which will now frank the traveller
through the most of North America, through the greater South Sea