"Perhaps it will be all right in the end--we hope it will: he says he will marry her and give her a home. But you never know where you are with a man of that colour--I'll believe it when I see it."
"Yes, he seems all right, and speaks well, and promises to pay the money. But look at the colour of his eyes! No, I can't trust him."
"He's a very nice person, I have no doubt, but his eyes and hair are enough for me," etc., etc.
Even this may be merely the effect of that enmity or suspicion with which the stranger, or "foreigner," as he is called, is often regarded in rural districts. The person from another county, or from a distance, unrelated to anyone in the community, is always a foreigner, and the foreign taint may descend to the children: may it not be that in Hampshire anyone with bright colour in eyes, hair, and skin is also by association regarded as a foreigner?
It remains to speak of the last of the four distinct types, the least common and most interesting of all--the small, narrow-headed man with very black hair, black eyes, and brown skin.
We are deeply indebted to the anthropologists who have, so to speak, torn up the books of history, and are re-telling the story of man on earth: we admire them for their patient industry, and because they have gone bravely on with their self-appointed task, one peculiarly difficult in this land of many { 236} mixed races, heedless of the scoffs of the learned or of those who derive their learning from books alone, and mock at men whose documents are "bones and skins." But we sometimes see that they (the anthropologists) have not yet wholly emancipated themselves from the old written falsehoods when they tell us, as they frequently do, that the Iberian in this country survives only in the west and the north. They refer to the small, swarthy Welshman; to the so-called "black Celt" in Ireland, west of the Shannon; to the small black Yorkshireman of the Dales, and to the small black Highlander; and the explanation is that in these localities remnants of the dark men of the Iberian race who inhabited Britain in the Neolithic period, were never absorbed by the conquerors; that, in fact, like the small existing herds of indigenous white cattle, they have preserved their peculiar physical character down to the present time by remaining unmixed with the surrounding blue-eyed people. But this type is not confined to these isolated spots in the west and north; it is found here, there, and everywhere, especially in the southern counties of England: you cannot go about among the peasants of Hampshire, Wiltshire, and Dorset without meeting examples of it, and here at all events, it cannot be said that the ancient British people were not absorbed. They, the remnant that escaped extermination, were absorbed by the blue-eyed, broad-headed, tall men, the Goidels we suppose, who occupied the country at the beginning of the Bronze Age; and the absorbers were in their { 237} turn absorbed by another blue-eyed race; and these by still another or by others. The only explanation appears to be that this type is persistent beyond all others, and that a very little black blood, after being mixed and re-mixed with blonde for centuries, even for hundreds of generations, may, whenever the right conditions occur, reproduce the vanished type in its original form.