“Aye, aye,” said Brother Edwin and sighed. “No one here in the land can make the like—they paint on glass, ’tis true, in Nidaros, but not like this—But away in the lands of the south, Kristin, in the great minsters, there they have such picture-panes, big as the doors of the church here—” Kristin thought of the pictures in the church at home. There was St. Olav’s altar and St. Thomas of Canterbury’s altar with pictures on their front panels and on the tabernacles behind—but those pictures seemed to her dull and lustreless as she thought of them now. They went down the ladder and up into the choir. There stood the altar table, naked and bare, and on the stone slab were set many small boxes and cups of metal and wood and earthenware; strange little knives and irons, pens and brushes lay about. Brother Edwin said these were his gear; he plied the crafts of painting pictures and carving altar-tabernacles, and the fine panels which stood yonder by the choir-stalls were his work. They were for the altarpieces here in the Preaching Friars’ church. Kristin watched how he mixed up coloured powders and stirred them into little cups of stoneware, and he let her help him bear the things away to a bench by the wall. While the monk went from one panel to another and painted fine red lines in the bright hair of the holy men and women so that one could see it curl and crinkle, Kristin kept close at his heels and gazed and questioned, and he explained to her what it was that he had limned. On the one panel sat Christ in a chair of gold, and St. Nicholas and St. Clement stood beneath a roof by his side. And at the sides was painted St. Nicholas’ life and works. In one place he sat as a suckling child upon his mother’s knee; he turned away from the breast she reached him, for he was so holy that from the very cradle he would not suck more than once on Fridays. Alongside of that was a picture of him as he laid the money-purses before the door of the house where dwelt the three maids who were so poor they could not find husbands. She saw how he healed the Roman knight’s child, and saw the knight sailing in a boat with the false chalice in his hands. He had vowed the holy bishop a chalice of gold which had been in his house a thousand years, as guerdon for bringing his son back to health again. But he was minded to trick St. Nicholas and give him a false chalice instead; therefore the boy fell into the sea with the true beaker in his hands. But St. Nicholas led the child unhurt underneath the water and up on to the shore just as his father stood in St. Nicholas’ church and offered the false vessel. It all stood painted upon the panels in gold and the fairest colours.