Strangers Yet

The man who composed that familiar delightful rhyme about blue eyes and
black, and how you are to beware of the hidden knife in the one case
and of a different sort of danger which may threaten you in the other,
must have lived a good long time ago, or else be a very old man. Oh, so
old, thousands of years, thousands of years, if all were told. And he,
when he exhibited such impartiality, must have had other-coloured eyes
himself. Most probably the sheep and goat eye, one which no person in
his senses--except an anthropologist--can classify as either dark or
light. It is that marmalade yellow, excessively rare in this country,
but not very uncommon in persons of Spanish race. For who at this day,
this age, after the mixing together of the hostile races has been going
on these twenty centuries or longer, can believe that any inherited or
instinctive animosity can still survive? If we do find such a feeling
here and there, would it not be more reasonable to regard it as an
individual antipathy, or as a prejudice, imbibed early in life from
parents or others, which endures in spite of reason, long after its
origin had been forgotten?

Nevertheless, one does meet with cases from time to time which do throw
a slight shadow of doubt on the mind, and of several I have met I will
here relate one.

At an hotel on the South Coast I met a Miss Browne, which is not her
name, and I rather hope this sketch will not be read by anyone nearly
related to her, as they might identify her from the description. A
middle-aged lady with a brown skin, black hair and dark eyes, an oval
face, fairly good-looking, her manner lively and attractive, her
movements quick without being abrupt or jerky. She was highly
intelligent and a good talker, with more to say than most women, and
better able than most to express herself. We were at the same small
table and got on well together, as I am a good listener and she knew--
being a woman, how should she not?--that she interested me. One day at
our table the conversation happened to be about the races of men and
the persistence of racial characteristics, physical and mental, in
persons of mixed descent. The subject interested her. "What would you
call me?" she asked.

"An Iberian," I returned.

She laughed and said: "This makes the third time I have been called an
Iberian, so perhaps it is true, and I'm curious to know what an Iberian
is, and why I'm called an Iberian. Is it because I have something of a
Spanish look?"

I answered that the Iberians were the ancient Britons, a dark-eyed,
brown-skinned people who inhabited this country and all Southern Europe
before the invasion of the blue-eyed races; that doubtless there had
been an