nees Mountains was taught in school to speak and read the
French language as we find it in books. Yet besides this, he knows a
dialect that is talked by the country people around him, that can not
be understood by the peasants from the north of France near the
Flemish border. The man who lives in the east of France can understand
the dialect of the Italians from the west of Italy much better than he
can that of the Frenchman from the Atlantic coast.

In America, with people moving around from place to place by means of
stage coach, steamboat, and railroad, there has been no great chance
to develop dialects, although we can instantly tell the New Englander,
the southerner, or the westerner by his speech. It should be
remembered that in Europe, for centuries, the people were kept on
their own farms or in their own towns. The result of this was that
each little village or city has its own peculiar language. It is said
that persons who have studied such language matters carefully, after
conversing with a man from Europe, can tell within thirty miles where
his home used to be in the old country. There are no sharply marked
boundaries of languages. The dialects of France shade off into those
of Spain on the one hand and into those of the Flemish and the Italian
on the other.

[Map: Southeastern Europe, 600 B.C.]

The British Isles furnish us with four or five different
nationalities. The people of the north of Ireland are really lowland
Scotch of Germanic descent, while the other three-fourths of Ireland
is inhabited by Celts. To make the difference all the greater, the
Celts are almost universally Catholics, while the Scotch-Irish are
Protestants. The people of the north of Scotland are Gaels, a Celtic
race having no connection in language or blood with the people of the
southern half of that country. The Welsh are a Celtic people, having
no relationship with the English, who are a Germanic people. The Welsh
and the Cornish of Cornwall and the people of highland Scotland are
the descendants of the ancient Britons and Gaels who inhabited the
island when Julius Caesar and the Romans first landed there. Then five
hundred years afterwards, as has already been told, came great swarms
of Germans (Angles, Saxons, and Jutes), who drove the Britons to the
west and north, and settled the country now known as England. After
these, you will recall, came a number of Danes, another Germanic
people, who settled the east coast of England