village, and in
one of the doorways an old woman sat with her knitting.

"Oh, look at that dear old woman!" cries Flora. "How pleasant she
looks, with her clean white apron and mutch!"

"Much, Flora?" said I. "What do you mean?" I thought it such an odd
word to use. What was she much?

Flora looked puzzled, and Mr Cameron answered for her, with amusement
in his eyes.

"A mutch, young lady," said he, "is what you in the South call a cap."

"The South!" cried I. "Why, Mr Cameron, you do not think we live in
the South?"

I felt almost vexed that he should fancy such a thing. For all that
Grandmamma and my Aunt Dorothea used to say, I always look down upon the
South. All the people I have seen who came from the South seemed to me
to have a great deal of wiliness and foolishness, and no commonsense. I
suppose the truth is that there are agreeable people, and good people,
in the South, only they have not come my way.

When I cried out like that, Mr Cameron laughed.

"Well," said he, "north and south are comparative terms. We in Scotland
think all England `the South,'--and so it is, if you will think a
moment. You in Cumberland, I suppose, draw the line at the Trent or the
Humber; lower down, they employ the Thames; and a Surrey man thinks
Sussex is the South. 'Tis all a matter of comparison."

"What does a Sussex man call the South?" said Angus.

"Spain and Portugal, I should think," said Mr Cameron.

"But, Mr Cameron," said I, "asking your pardon, is there not some
difference of character or disposition between those in the North and in
the South--I mean, of England?"

"Quite right, young lady," said he. "They are different tribes; and the
Lowland Scots, among whom you are now coming, have the same original as
yourself. There were two tribes amongst those whom we call
Anglo-Saxons, that peopled England after the Britons were driven into
Wales--namely, as you might guess, the Angles and the Saxons. The
Angles ran from the Frith of Forth to the Trent; the Saxons from the
Thames southward. The midland counties were in all likelihood a mixture
of the two. There are, moreover, several foreign elements beyond this,
in various counties. For instance, there is a large influx of Danish
blood on the eastern coast, in parts of Lancashire, in Yorkshire and
Lincolnshire, and in the Weald of Sussex; there was a Flemish settlement
in Lancashire and Norfolk, of considerable extent; the Britons were left
in g