twinkling, and he goes straight to paradise.” After the pile was consumed to ashes they raised a great-mound over the spot, and set up on it a pillar made of a tree-trunk, on which they carved the names of the dead man and of their king. The burial usages, however, were not always the same. Great men were buried with the pomp and ceremony befitting their rank, while meaner men were simply reduced to ashes and inhumed in a clay urn, or in a stone pot, not unfrequently in the stone cooking-kettle that had served them when in life.[218] This burial in stone urns, or in cooking vessels of steatite, is of common occurrence in the grave-mounds of the Viking period in Norway, and is also not unfrequently found in Orkney and Shetland. [Illustration: Bronze brooch] Associated with such burials in Norway there are occasionally found the peculiar brooches which are characteristic of the later Pagan time.[219] Although they occur perhaps more frequently with unburnt burials, they link on with the custom of cremation. Thus they afford a valuable index to the chronology of these remains in Scotland, because the Pagan period of the Scandinavian occupation may be said to be limited to the time between the expedition of Harald Harfagri and the battle of Clontarf (872-1014). These brooches are found in Scandinavian graves of this period, in Scotland, England, Ireland, Normandy, Russia, and Iceland—in short, wherever the heathen Vikings effected a settlement. In Scotland they have been found in various places—in Sutherland, in Caithness, in Orkney, in the Hebrides, and even in remote St. Kilda. The specimen here figured, which is now in the Museum of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland is one of a pair found in a stone cist on a mound which covered the remains of a “Pictish Tower” at Castletown in Caithness.[220] They are usually found in pairs, one near each shoulder of the skeleton. This corresponds with the statement of an ancient Arab writer, that the Norse women used to wear such brooches in pairs on their breasts.[221] [Illustration: Comb]