serfage, were laid upon the Odaller without appeal—for by the forfeiture of Balfour the Sheriff, and gift of his escheit, Lord Robert was again Sheriff and Foud, with power to call and pack the Lawthings with creatures of his own, and to use or pervert the Law-book according to his will or interest. By such pretended decrees, many Odallers were, like Rendall of Gairsey, evicted without a chance of justice; some were escheited for murder, theft, witchcraft, suicide, or “moving of a march-stane,” others by the slower process of burdens or debts accumulated till the arrear warranted Comprysing by him as creditor, or Escheit as Superior—new enactments, new offences, new courts and new fines, enriched the Sheriff and pillaged the Suitors. Not content with multiplying the forms of exaction, with retrospective enforcement of half a century of arrears, and compulsory second payment to himself of sums already accounted for to the Royal Comptroller, he aggravated every burden by adding a fourth to each standard of measure and weight, replaced the inconvenient vigilance of the Law-rightmen by Weighers of his own choice, and cried up or down the tariff and the coinage according to his interest as buyer or as seller. To guard against appeal or complaint, he enacted the penalty of death or escheit for crossing Firth or ferry without his passport; and against any outbreak of native despair, he was provided with a body of outlaws and broken men, living at free quarters upon the plundered natives, and knowing no law except the will of their present paymaster. Sea and land, Tack and teind, Court and gibbet, Mint and Tron, Firth and Ferry, all were in the hands of the Donatary. To such a power, supported by the public warrant of the Royal Charter and the secret evidence of the Rentall, the Odaller had nothing to oppose except the moral weight of ancient tradition, and a physical force which had lost more by its divided poverty than it had gained by increased numbers—and now the very Law-book and Thing of his Odal fathers were made to doom away his liberties and his lands, in a strange tongue, at the bidding of the Donatary. For some years Lord Robert superintended the fleecing of the Islands from the ancient Episcopal Palace of Kirkwall or from his lodge at Dynrostness; but as a local habitation for his full-grown greatness, he created at Birsa, the seat of the old Orkneyan Jarls, a large baronial domain by special extirpation of the Odallers, and there, by the forced labours of the natives, “without meat, drink or wages,” he built a palace after the manner of Falkland, and inscribed it: “=DOMINUS ROBERTUS STEWARTUS FILIUS JACOBI QUINTI REX SCOTORUM HOC OPUS INSTRUXIT.=” His vanity was mimicked at a humble distance by his brother and villanous instrument, Cultmalindy, in his Zetland Castle of Muness, with a doggrel motto of equal self-complacency—