When it first began to look down from its windows upon those men going about their business in the sunshine or the rain, it saw among the little creatures some that were well worth remembering, though there be few but the cathedral to remember them now. There was Rognvald himself, that cheerful, gallant earl who made poetry and war, and sailed to Jerusalem with all his chiefs and friends, fighting and rhyming all the way, and riding home across the length of Europe, and who, when he fell by an assassin’s hand, was laid at last beneath the pavement of this cathedral he had founded. And then, most memorable of all the great odallers who followed him in war and sat at his Yule feasts, there was the Viking, Sweyn Asleifson, he who kidnapped Paul, and afterwards became the lifelong and, on the whole, faithful friend of Rognvald, and the faithless enemy of almost every one else; the most daring, unscrupulous, famous, and—judging by the way he always obtained forgiveness when he needed it—the most fascinating man in all the northern countries. He was the luckiest, too, till the day he fell in an ambush in the streets of Dublin, exclaiming with his last breath, in most remarkable contrast to the tenor of his life: “Know this, all men, that I am one of the Saint Earl Rognvald’s bodyguard, and I now mean to put my trust in being where he is, with God.” May he rest in peace wherever his bones lie, even though his reformation came something late, the turbulent, terrible old Viking, whom the Saga writers called the last of that profession. The generation who built it had passed away, when on a summer’s day, after it had weathered nearly a century of storm and shine, the cathedral saw the greatest sight it had yet beheld. Haco of Norway had come with his fleet to conquer the Western Isles of Scotland, the Norse kings’ old inheritance. The pointed windows watched ship after ship sail by with coloured sails and shining shields, bearing the Norsemen to their last battle in southern lands; and then the islands waited for the news that in those days was brought by the men who had made the story. Month upon month went by; men wondered and rumours flew; the days grew shorter, and the gales came out upon all the seas. At last, when winter was well upon the islands, what were left of the battered ships began to struggle home. They brought back stories that the cathedral remembers, though six centuries have rolled them out of the memories of the people—tales of lee-shores and westerly gales, of anchors dragging under the Cumbraes, and Scottish knights charging down upon the beach where the Norwegian spears were ranked on the edge of the tide; then of more gales and whirlpools in the Pentland, until at length they carried their old sick king ashore, to die in the bishop’s palace at Kirkwall. [Illustration: _St. Magnus Cathedral, exterior._ 1. West doorway, nave. 2. East window. 3. Doorway, south transept. 4. Doorway, north aisle. 5. Doorway, south aisle.]