hese old Iberians
were not a tribe or clan, but a people, numerous and potential, with a
fully developed and virile language, skilled in arms and the working
of precious metals, and industriously commercial. This much can be
clearly inferred from the extent of their territory and the remnant of
them, with their characteristics and habits, which still remain. This
old people, themselves a colony from some other country, once existent
and highly civilized in the remote past, spread from the Mediterranean
Sea to the slopes of the Pyrenees, and all over southern Gaul as far
as the Rhone, and flowed westward with a movement so forceful that it
included all the British Islands. All this happened 4000 to 5000 B. C.
They are older than the Egyptians probably by 1000 years, and were
strong enough to attempt the conquest of the known world.

"These Iberians colonized Sicily. They were the original settlers in
Italy and pushed their way northward as far as Norway and Sweden,
where can still be found among the present inhabitants their physical
characteristics--dark skin and jet black hair. This ancient people
were not barbarians, but highly civilized. They had the art of writing
and a literature. Poetry was cultivated. Their laws were set in verse;
and for these laws thus written they claimed an antiquity of 6000
years.

"This ancient race has passed away, as all great races do. The rise
and decline of a people are as a day. They have a sunrise, a noon, a
sunset, and there remains of them and their splendor nothing but a
gloaming, a twilight of a thousand years, perhaps, and after that

OBLIVION'S STARLESS NIGHT.

"This old Iberian, world-conquering race came to its sunset hour a
thousand years ago, and the gloaming after their sunset is deepening
into that gloom which hides all. Only a remnant, a hint of the
old-time radiance, remains up to this day.

"In Southern Europe, the remnant of this antique race, the fragment of
a root with the old-time vigorous sap in it, may still be found.
There, on the Spanish peninsula where its cradle was rocked, the grave
of a once powerful race is being slowly sodded; for there still live
that strange people called the Basques. It matters not today what they
are--chiefly mountaineers, I think--but they are of the old Iberian
stock, and the Iberians were colonists from some unknown land,
pre-historic, undiscoverable by us. Colonists and colonizers also.
From some unknown land, hidden from