So, a child of the Old Town may be forgiven for calling up the Red Gods on occasion. Indeed, they had left their tracks where he who ran might read. The other day I heard how, in restoring the Bishop’s Manse, they had come upon traces of the old spiral stairway, which even in that house of peace wound to the right, as the custom was, so that the man defending it might have his right hand free, while the attacking enemy had to strike from the left. Perhaps, though, it was not always a house of peace, nor the enemy all of the world and the flesh, for I read in the archives of the Domkirke of a least one pitched battle between the Brethren of the Chapter, that is, the clerics attached to the cathedral, and the Bishop, in which the latter had his robe torn from his back. Three hundred years later I find the Chapter uniting in a round-robin to the Bishop, in which perjury, simony, and lewdness are among the open offences laid at his door. Unless he mend his ways, they give notice, they will have him before the Pope. [Illustration: AN OLD HOUSE.] Doughty scrappers were they ever, those old Jutes. Doubtless there was reason for the Ribe justice that was proverbial throughout the days when each town was a law unto itself. “‘You thank God, sonny,’ is an old saw that has come down to this day, ‘that you weren’t punished by Ribe law,’ said the old woman, when she saw her son hung on the Varde gallows.” Varde was the next town, a little way up the coast. The symbol of that justice was an iron hand over the town gate which, tradition said, warned any who might be disposed to buy up grain and food-stuffs to their own gain, that for “cornering” the means of living, in Ribe a man had his right hand cut off. Good that the hand was never nailed on Trinity Church or on the Chicago Board of Trade, else what a one-handed lot of men we should have there and in Wall Street! Whether that was the real purpose of it or not, the Old Town was ruled with an iron hand indeed in those days. Witness the report, preserved in its archives, of the conviction of a woman for _stealing_ the hand-iron which her thieving husband carried off with him when he broke jail. She filed it off and threw it into a neighbor’s yard, and not only she, but the neighbor, too, was convicted of theft. And stealing was a hanging matter. Stealing less than two dollars’ worth of property took a man to the gallows straight; but a woman, “for decency’s sake,” was buried alive in the gallows hill. For murder, counterfeiting and adulteration of honey,--why specially honey, I do not know,--and for eloping with another’s wife, a man’s head was chopped off with the big sword that still hung in the Town Hall. There were holes in the end of it, so that it might be weighted and made to “bite.” The bigamist was merely turned out of town and mulcted in half his belongings. But even the iron hand did not stop brawling, and other measures had to be adopted. A man was accused of knocking