e opposite continent is German--Cuxhaven, Bremen,
and Hamburg, being all German towns. And what the towns are the country
is also--or nearly so. It is German--which Heligoland is _not_.

The Heligolanders are no Germans, but _Frisians_. I have lying before me
the Heligoland version of _God save the Queen_. A Dutchman would
understand this, easier than a Low German, a Low German easier than an
Englishman, and (I _think_) an Englishman easier than a German of
Bavaria. The same applies to another sample of the Heligoland muse--_the
contented Heligolander's wife_ (_Dii tofreden Hjelgeluennerin_), a pretty
little song in Hettema's collection of Frisian poems; with which,
however, the native literature ends. There is plenty of Frisian verse in
general; but little enough of the particular Frisian of Heligoland.

A difference like that between the Frisians of Heligoland and the
Germans of Hanover, is always suggestive of an ethnological alternative;
since it is a general rule, supported both by induction and common
sense, that, except under certain modifying circumstances, islands
derive their inhabitants from the nearest part of the nearest continent.
When, however, the populations differ, one of two views has to be taken.
Either some more distant point than the one which geographical proximity
suggests has supplied the original occupants, or a change has taken
place on the part of one or both of the populations since the period of
the original migration.

Which has been the case here? The latter. The present Germans of the
coast between the Elbe and Weser are not the Germans who peopled
Heligoland, nor yet the descendants of them. Allied to them they are;
inasmuch as Germany is a wide country, and German a comprehensive term;
but they are not the same. The two peoples, though like, are different.

Of what sort, then, were the men and women that the present Germans of
the Oldenburg and Hanoverian coast have displaced and superseded? Let us
investigate. Whoever rises from the perusal of those numerous notices of
the ancient Germans which we find in the classical writers, to the usual
tour of Rhenish Germany, will find a notable contrast between the
natives of that region as they _were_ and as they _are_. His mind may be
full of their _golden_ hair, expecting to find it _flaxen_ at least.
Blue and grey eyes, too, he will expect to preponderate over the black
and hazel. This is what he will have read about, and what he will _no