The whole of the East Mainland lies at our feet—Deerness, bright and sunny, with the Moul Head stretching boldly out to sea; nearer is St. Andrews, and Holm, half hidden by the ridge of high ground in the north of that parish; and, nearer still, St. Ola, deeply cut into by the Bays of Kirkwall and Scapa, which look as if they only awaited the next spring tide to join hands across the narrow isthmus, the Peerie Sea lying ready to do its part. [Illustration: _Round about Kirkwall._] Kirkwall, the “Kirk Voe” of the Norsemen, is more worthy of its name to-day than when the little church of St. Olaf was the chief object in the landscape. Approach it how we may, the great Cathedral of St. Magnus arrests our attention. Seen from Wideford Hill the tower does not break the skyline, as it does from the sea; yet the mass of sombre reddish masonry asserts itself, and dominates the pearl-gray cluster of walls and roofs that spreads around, as it has done for nearly eight hundred years. “Tame” and “uninteresting” are the words often used to describe the appearance of our island capital. It does not seem so to-day. As the eye sweeps down over the purple shoulder of the hill to the green fields below, and passes over the silver gleam of the water with broken reflections of tower and gable beyond, it rests upon a picture filled with many charms of line, mass, and colour, from which the deep cool green of tree and shrub is not wholly wanting. Open to the north and the south by the “Viking path” of the sea, and joined to the east and the west by more modern paths, the thin white lines of curving roadway, Kirkwall shows itself the natural focus of our island commerce and social life, and the centre of a wide and fair landscape. Northward and westward next we turn our view. Kirkwall Bay opens out into the “Wide Fiord,” which doubtless gave our hill its name, and westward into the “Aurrida Fiord,” or Sea-trout Firth, which first gave its name to the parish of Firth, and then received in exchange its present name, the Bay of Firth. Its shores are low and well cultivated, but to the north rises the dark brown ridge formed by the hills of Firth and of Rendall, which hide from our view most of the parish of Evie and parts of Harray and Birsay. To the left of this ridge, through the central valley of Firth and Stenness, a charming vista opens out. A rich and fertile sweep of low ground forms the basin of the great lochs, and on the long peninsula between them we can distinguish the Standing Stones rising as needle points against the blue expanse of the Loch of Stenness. The green mound of Maeshowe, too, is clearly visible. Far away, over the cultivated slopes of Sandwick, we see the soft shimmer of the Atlantic, and to the northward the undulating skyline of the Birsay Hills.