It is pleasant to think, for the old minster’s sake, that it heeds the rubs of fortune very little, and regards material changes just as so many shifts of plumage. Its people are still flesh and blood, and its islands rock and turf and heather, and it will take more than pails and paint-brushes, and pledges and covenants to make them otherwise. The winter days are as bleak as ever, and the summer evenings as long and light, and the sun rises out of the North Sea among the flat green islands, and sinks in the Atlantic behind the western heather hills; and it is likely enough that from the height of the cathedral tower many other most serious events look surprisingly unimportant. J. STORER CLOUSTON. (_“Macmillan’s Magazine.” By permission._) [Illustration: _Kirkwall in winter._] A ROAD IN ORCADY. In southern lands—and most lands are southern to us—the road runs between fragrant hedgerows or under shady trees; but in Orcady trees and hedges are practically unknown. Yet the road lacks not its charm, for this is a world of compensations. If we never breathe the fragrance of the may or hear the whisper of the wind-stirred branches, we have, on the other hand, nothing to shut out from our eyes the wide expanse of land and sea or to hide the blue sky over us, no fallen timber after a gale to block our way and make of our progress an involuntary obstacle race, and no thorns to puncture our cycle tyres. The lover of the highway may miss here much of the bird-life that enlivens the roads of the south; but our road has a life and traffic of its own quite apart from the trickling stream of men and horses which flows fitfully along its white channel. Flowers and flies, birds and beasts, the road has something for each and all of them. Even by day they use it, but from dusk to dawn they claim it as their very own. [Illustration: _By the Roadside—“Peerie Hooses.”_ 1. Holm. 2. Harray. 3. Birsay. 4. Tankerness. 5. Orphir.] I do not remember that Stevenson, who so loved the road, has written anywhere of its little life—of the birds and beasts, the shy living things, that haunt it. In the treeless isles of Orcady, at least, the furred and feathered creatures seem to think that man makes the road for their especial delectation. For all creatures of beach and bog, hill and meadow, it has its charms; and hence it is ever beat upon by soft, soundless feet and shadowed by swiftly moving wings, and many a little comedy or tragedy is played out upon its stage. We walk upon it in spring and summer through an air fragrant with the perfume of innumerable small, sweet flowers, with the music of birds and bees about us, and ever, under and behind all song, the voice of the great sea, full of indefinable mystery as of a half-remembered dream.