The country is like a fleet at sea, and the old spirit of the people came from the deep. At first that spirit was only restless and fierce and free; in time it began to think, and at odd moments to be troubled, and they called it pious. Then it looked for a fitting house where it might live when it could no longer find a home in the people. So it built the red cathedral, and there it silently dwells to-day. There is something in their church that none of the respectable townsfolk have the slightest suspicion of—something alive that vibrates to the cry of the wind and the breaking of the sea, and the little human events that happen in the crow-stepped houses. On the wild autumn afternoons when the hard north-east wind is driving rain and sleet through the town, the old church begins to remember. The wind and the sleet coming over the sea stir the quick spirit so sharply that every angle is full of sighing noises. As the shortened day draws to an end, and lights begin to twinkle in the town, and the showers become less frequent, and the clouds are rolled up and gathered off the sky, then the people come out into the streets and see the early stars above the gable-ends and high cathedral tower. They think it cold, and walk quickly, but a personage of sandstone takes little note of the temperature. The cathedral merely feels refreshed. When the clear, windy night draws in, the people go to rest, and one by one the lights are put out till only the stars and the lighthouses are left. Looking over a darkened town and an empty night, with the air moving fresh from Norway, the memories come thick upon the old church which shelters so many bones. It is like digging up the soil of those lands from which the sea has for centuries receded, and where the ribs of ships and the skeletons of sailors lie deep beneath the furrows of the plough. Kirkwall must have been a strange little town before the cathedral’s memory begins, when there was no red tower above the narrow street and the little houses, in the days when Rognvald, the son of Kol, had vowed to dedicate a splendid minster to his uncle, St. Magnus, should he come by his own and call himself Earl of Orkney; and when the islanders waited to see what aid the blessed saint would furnish to this enterprise. It is one of the island tragedies—the saga of how the evil Earl Hakon slew his cousin, Earl Magnus, outside the old church of Egilsay with that high round tower that you can see over Kirkwall Bay from the cathedral parapet, and how the grass grew greener where he fell, and miracles multiplied, and they made him a saint in time.