One might think that, when they had ceased to be a half-way house between their sovereign and his neighbours of Europe, and were become instead a geographical term applied to the least accessible portion of their new lord’s dominions, their history and their troubles would soon have ceased, and the islanders been left to fish and reap late crops and try to keep out the winter weather. But there was no such good luck for many a day to come. Alas for themselves, they were too valuable an asset in the Scotch king’s treasury. Orkney too valuable! That collection of windy, treeless islands, where great ponds of rain-water stand through the fields for months together, and a strawberry that ripens is shown to one’s friends! The plain truth is that, measured by a Scotch standard of value in those days, it would have been hard to find a pocket not worth the picking. The rental of Orkney was more than twice that of the kingdom of Fife, and Fife, I suppose, was an El Dorado compared with most provinces of its impecunious country. So north they came, Scotch earls and bishops and younger sons, to make what they could before the pledge was redeemed. And to the old cathedral was flung the shame of standing as the symbol of oppression. It was not its fault, and every stone must have silently cried to Heaven for forgiveness. But a cathedral meant a bishop, and an Orkney bishop meant the refinement of roguery and exaction. When these prelates in their turns came to inhabit permanently their minster, and they could at last hear the voice of its spirit that loves the land it watches, demanding an account of their stewardship, what could they say? The old excuse—“We must live”? I can hardly think the church perceived the necessity. That monument which the old sailors and fighters of the north had built, that they might link a better world with the rough and warring earth, had to stand immovable for century upon century, watching the trouble of their sons. It saw them make their stand at Summerdale in the old fashion, with sword and halbert and a battle-cry on their lips, and march back again to the town in a glimpse of triumph. But that quickly faded, and the weight of new laws and evil rulers gradually broke the high spirit entirely. It saw the proud odallers reduced to long-suffering “peerie lairds,” and all their power and romance and circumstance of state pass over to the foreigner, until after a time it was hard to believe that, some pages further back, there was a closed chapter of history which read quite differently from this. Down below the parapet of the tower the narrow streets were full of the most splendid-looking people, all in steel and the Stewart arms. Earls Robert and Patrick of that royal name, each, through his scandalous life, made the island the home of a prince’s court; and out among the moors and the islands the old race wondered whose turn it should be for persecution next, and how long Heaven would let these things be.