If there had been a native population, and if these had been either expelled or exterminated by the invaders, we should surely have been told of it by the Saga writers, who would have delighted in telling such a tale. It has accordingly been supposed that at the time of the Norse settlement the islands were uninhabited save by the hermits of the Culdee Church. When or how the former Pictish inhabitants disappeared it is impossible to say. Possibly some early Viking raids, of which no history remains, had resulted in the slaughter of many and the flight of the rest to the less exposed lands south of the Pictland or Pentland Firth. Whatever the reason may be, the chapter of our Island history which opens with the Norse settlement is in no way a continuation of anything which goes before, but begins a new story. [Illustration: _Carved Stone Balls._] THE NORSEMEN AND THEIR SAGAS. It is late in the eighth century before the Northman or Norseman appears on the stage of history. From the day when Cæsar’s victorious legions brought the Gauls, the Germans, and the Britons under the sway of the imperial city, these nations of Western Europe are never again entirely lost to history. But Scandinavia and the countries round the Baltic remained unknown to Rome and to the world for long centuries afterwards. “There nature ends,” one of the Roman writers has said, when speaking of these northern lands. This brief yet expressive sentence well indicates how completely outside the Roman world lay the countries which were the cradle of our race. There is another side to all this, which we find it difficult to picture clearly in our minds. To the inhabitants of Scandinavia and the lands round the Baltic, the southern parts of Europe were equally unknown. We find in a Scandinavian writer of the ninth century a description of an expedition which was made by one of the Viking chiefs to this unknown world. In the course of his travels he came upon a city which to the Norseman seemed mysterious and dread—a city of Niflheim, the under-world. This city, as we learn from contemporary Western writers, must have been Paris. Paris, now the gay capital of Europe, and even then a city of importance and of fame, was so unknown to the Norsemen of the early ninth century that it was deemed a part of Niflheim, the under-world! During the period when the northern nations were hidden from the eye of history, many changes must have been going on among them. The building and management of ships could not have been learned in a day, and even when we first catch sight of the Norsemen they were the finest and most daring seamen in the world, and their ships probably the most perfect hitherto seen. Many voyages among their own islands and in the Baltic must have preceded the longer voyages to Britain, to Iceland, to Greenland, and to America. Numerous wars there must have been, quite unknown to history, before the northern warrior became the terrible fighter of the Viking Age.