At Pittenweem, St Monance, and other places along the coast as far as Fifeness, there are several caves which have pilgrim crosses and other symbols of archaic character carved upon their rocky walls. All of these seem at one time to have been occupied as places of retreat and devotion by saints or recluses of the early Celtic Church, and doubtless are the _steddis sere_ (that is, the ‘several places’) referred to in Wyntoun’s narrative. At Fifeness is the cave of Constantine, king of the Scots, who, after a reign of forty years, exchanged the sceptre for the pilgrim’s staff, and ‘died in the house of the Apostle;’ that is, of St Andrew. At St Andrews itself is the cave of St Rule, or rather what remains of it, for it has been much destroyed within the last half-century. Sir Walter Scott describes the palmer in _Marmion_ as bound to fair St Andrews: Within the ocean cave to pray, Where good St Rule his holy lay, From midnight to the dawn of day, Sang to the billows’ sound; and mentions that on one side of the cave there still remained a sort of stone altar. The _Aberdeen Breviary_ states that St Gernadius, who settled at Kennedor, in Moray, lived in a cell partly natural, but artificially adapted for a habitation, in which he was wont to repose his wearied limbs on a bed of stone. His cave in the neighbourhood of Lossiemouth is distinguished by the holy well close beside it, which had a local reputation until quite recently, and is still known as St Gerardine’s Well. St Baldred of the Bass, who sat upon the rock in Aldhame Bay, and caused it to transport itself out of the fairway, had his cave also in the cliff opposite this rock; and traces have been found both upon the rock itself and in the cave of a long-continued occupation at a remote period. Although the materials for the illustration of this long-forgotten phase of ecclesiastical life are so few and fragmentary, they suffice to reveal the presence in these early ages of a passionate fervour of devotion and a child-like simplicity of faith to which we are altogether strangers in these times. The systems and institutions by which they were created and fostered ‘are productions of old ages, not to be repeated in the new: they presuppose a certain rudeness of conception, which the progress of mere scientific knowledge puts an end to.’ BY MEAD AND STREAM. CHAPTER XLII.—A LAND SHIPWRECK.