lawless debauchee, a base intriguer, and the scandal of honest folk; one who had nothing to lose in the way of reputation. Yet all the same I was secretly proud of myself and fancied that only by deep inner experiences like those I had passed through, is one qualified to call oneself a man.

The man in question, however, was only an elongated baby who could still amuse himself by the hour together with all the surviving toys of his babyhood-dolls, tops, glass baubles, and even paper birds. I chose retired spots for these recreations and if any of the family caught me in the act, I hastened to tuck my toys away and made a shame-faced pretence of having been moved to review these childish possessions by the curiosity of a philosopher given to meditations on his own past. But now that I know the world and life, I am not at all ashamed to confess that this passion for toys attacked me at intervals till I was nearly thirty, and that after I had been guilty of several books, I passed many a delightful half hour making those wooden frogs which have a twisted thread underneath, and jump about on the table. Even now, when I pass before a toy shop, I sometimes feel strangely tempt ed, and why should I blush to own it? Men are but children of a larger growth who ordinarily conceal their childishness under a mask of gravity, which they gladly abandon whenever they feel sure of not being found out. Moreover, to weave visions, as we all do, of things strange and impossible, but ardently desired, is but toying with ideas and images. The author who intersperses his manuscript with sketches or covers his margins with whirligigs is playing like a child, and so is the Minister of State who in his leisure moments folds and refolds in a dozen different shapes his morning paper or beats a tattoo on his desk with his pa

per-knife, as was Count Cavour's habit during the speeches of long-winded deputies. It is my opinion that if the most serious man on earth were to be locked up in an empty room with a box of tin soldiers the moment would come when he would take them out, range them in order and make them manœuvre like any boy of six. This persistent love of toys, diverted my mind to some extent from my love-affairs and acted as a very salutary sedative. Ah, could one of the many dames for whose behoof I made sheep's eyes and assumed troubadour poses in the theatre have beheld me on one of those mornings which I spent rolling along the table rows of nuts, upon some of which I had pasted bits of gilt paper, to represent the staff of either army then fighting in Lombardy, what a burst of silvery laughter I should have received full in the face and what a smart tap of the parasol, perhaps, upon the back of my neck! But let mothers beware how they make sport of their tall boys when they see them occupied with toys which they might presumably have outgrown had they been gifted with ordinary intelligence. It is rather a sign of singleness of mind and a lively fancy:of the power to create an imaginary world, and people it with delightful impersonations; and these are qualities which may afford the child great solace in his maturer years; providing him with a refuge in his own mind from the pressure of painful realities, keeping alight the fire of youth and preserving intact those fond illusions, without which, life would inevitably become with the majority of men a constant desire for death.

This academic year was, however, to afford me a distraction from my studies far more potent than either my friends the bersaglieri or my own unrequited affections had proved. Even as Victor Emmanuel had dealt a death

blow to my Latin in 1859, so Garibaldi became in 1860 the mortal foe of my Greek, for a knowledge of that language having been found essential to the speedy enfranchisement of Italy, it was first introduced into the Gymnasium course, in that same year.

But the departure of the "Thousand" from Quarto might have been a signal agreed upon by Garibaldi and us scholars for ceasing to trouble our brains about text-books. They left for Sicily in crowds, youths of every rank and station, even some who had been public laughing-stocks, like a certain little hunchbacked tailor, with legs which bowed out like two slices of melon, who, I remember, was greeted on his departure by a tempest of laughter and applause. With the war of 1860 a new bee began buzzing in my bonnet; I became a politician. My greatest friends, at that time, were two school-mates of revolutionary principles, one because he was son of a famous Mazzinian; the other because he was an instinctive rebel against all authority, from Xenophon down. My father was a monarchist, and I was naturally far from a radical, but I had gradually become such through the daily perusal of the Diritto, to which my father's literary tastes had led him to become a subscriber. Being, all three of us, fanatical devotees of Garibaldi we planned a clandestine evasion that we might "fly to his assistance." How our attempt failed I have told in another place, but the fiasco only inflamed our patriotic ardor. We became the implacable enemies of Cavour, who "frustrated the attempt of Garibaldi by the wily arts of a pusillanimous policy";-a phrase which pleased us immensely. The cession of Nice and Savoy to France drove us out of our senses with wrath. In all our conversations we made mincemeat of the unlucky minister. We read his speeches in the papers with a smile

of bitter sarcasm. We likewise were in the habit of treating as he deserved, "Napoleon the Little," with whom we were intimately acquainted, thanks to the diatribes of Victor Hugo. Concerning both these men we held furious discussions with our "moderate" school-fellows, who were wont to accuse us of "putting a spoke in the wheels of governmental policy." Το which the three of us would reply in chorus, "Even so! We propose to resist the Count of Cavour with all our might:—to grant him no truce. We want nothing of his policy of servitude to the stranger. He who is not with us, is against Italy." Later, when La Farina went to take up arms in Sicily, we really sinned against light and, imagining that a gauntlet had been thrown down before the man who had sold Nice and Savoy, we talked of founding a paper to "finish" him. I remember how I used to rage at the opinion of Garibaldi expressed by certain old Cavour-mad officials who came to our house. Among the rest there was an Inspector of something or other, a hoary-headed giant who talked with an insupportable drawl as though at each word which dropped from his mouth a dollar would leak out of his purse. When I heard this man speak of Garibaldi as the "marplot of the policy of Turin," an "importunate disturber of the peace of the world," sent among us for our bitter discipline; when I heard him conclude with his customary phrase, at which my father used to shrug his shoulders,-"He will give us rope to twist! You will see! You will see!" then would I shoot glances of enmity at the man which should have pierced him through and through. The acute stage of my Garlbaldian fever lasted until the Geneeral's return to Caprera. What happened to our studies during the latter months of that scholastic year may be imagined. They went the way of the

King of Naples. But I fancy that anyone was sure of promotion at that glorious period who shouted "Viva l'Italia!" and even I got my grade. A few days after the examination as I passed through an alley-way near my home I saw a crowd of women gathered about the door of a haberdasher's shop, whose proprietress was sitting with her elbows on her knees and her head between her hands, weeping as Nuova Antologia.

though her heart would break. To my question one of the women answered, "They have murdered her son at Milass." My first feeling was one of pity, my next, I am glad to say, of shame. I heard an inner voice which said to me, "This man fought and died, while for three months you have done nothing but rant, idiot that you are!" And after that day I modified my vocabulary about Cavour.

You would hardly expect to find an ancient cathedral up in those Orkney islands that one usually sees huddled away in a spare corner of the map and made to look even smaller than they are by the exigencies of space. Drawn to half scale they seem like the fragments of a bursting shell scattered about an ocean which not so very many degrees higher becomes the empty Arctic. It is curious to think of: once, long ago, strange ships with monstrous figure-heads and painted sides, full of the Northern actors of history, crawled with their lines of oars into the sounds and bays of these islands, till for centuries they became the stage for dramatic events and stirring personages. Some of the players bore names that any history-book tells of. Harald Hardrada, old King Haco, Bothwell, and Montrose have all played their parts. And there are others, earls, and prelates, and Northern kings, and old searovers, who were really far better worth knowing than half the puppets with more familiar labels. Then, gradually, the lights went out and the audience turned away to look at other things, and the Orkneymen were left to observe the Sabbath and elect a County Council. One by one the old

buildings toppled down and the old names changed and the old customs faded, till the place of the islands in history became their place upon the map; but time and man have spared one thing,-this old cathedral church of St. Magnus in Kirkwall.

On the ancient houses of the little borough and the winding slit of a street the old red church still looks down benignly, and sometimes (of a Sunday I think especially) a little humorously. Over the grey roofs and the tree-tops in sheltered gardens and the black mites of people passing on their business, its lustreless Gothic eyes see a wide expanse of land and a wider and brighter sweep of sea. The winding sounds and broadening bays join and divide and join again, through and through its island dominions. Backwards and forwards, twice a day, the flood tide pours from the open Atlantic, and each channel becomes an eastward flowing river, and then from the North Sea the ebb sets the races running to the west. Everywhere is the sight or the sound of the sea; rollers on the western cliffs, salt currents among the islands, quiet bays lapping the feet of heathery hills. Out of the two great oceans the wind blows like

the blasts of an enormous bellows, and on the horizon the clouds are eternally gathering.

It is over this land of moor and water and vapor that the cathedral watches the people; and though from the difficulty of passing through so arow a street it has never moved from the spot where it first arose, and never seen, one would suppose, the greater part of its territories, yet it knows,-none better-the stories and the spirit of all the islands. Crows and gulls cruise round the tower familiarly and perhaps bring gossip, but eyes so long and narrow, and of so inhuman an anatomy, may very likely see through a hill or a heart for themselves.

The country is like a fleet at sea, and the old spirit of the people came from the deep. At first it 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 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 Saint 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.

Though all these events happened before a stone of the cathedral was laid, they may help to give the meaning of its story, and on that account they are worth, perhaps, a rough telling here. Earl Hakon had died, and his son Paul ruled in his stead. He was a silent, brave, unlucky man, upright and honorable in his dealings,

but the shadow of his father's crime lay over the land. It brought old age and prosperity and repentance to the doer of the deed; on his son the punishment fell.

Rognvald claimed the half of the earldom. Paul answered that there was no need for long words, "For I will guard the Orkneys while God grants me life so to do." And then the contest began. Rognvald attacked from north and south: Paul vanquished the southern fleet and hurrying north drove his rival back to Norway; and so the winter came on and the peace that in those days men kept in winter.

All had gone well with Paul, but his luck was to change with a little thing. He was keeping Yule with his friends and kinsmen, when, upon a winter's evening, a man, wet with the spray of the Pentland Firth, came out of the dusk and knocked upon the door. He was hardly the instrument, one would think, a departed saint would choose to build a cathedral with, a viking with his sword ever loose in its sheath, and his lucky star obscured, coming here for refuge from the ashes of his father and his home. He was known as Swein Asleifson (a name to be famous in the islands) and welcomed for his family's sake; they brought him in to the feast, and the drinking went on. In a little while there arose a quarrel over the cups; Swein killed his man and fled out into the night again. He was a landless outlaw this time, for the dead man had been high in favor and the Earl was stern. Meanwhile men went on drinking over the hall fires, but Paul's luck had departed, and Saint Magnus had a weapon to his hand. In the spring the war began again, and suddenly in the midst of it Earl Paul disappeared, his body-guard cut down upon the beach, himself spirited clean away. Swein Asleifson had come for him and carried him to a fate that was never more than rumored.

So Rognvald won the earldom, and the first stones of his church were laid. The Saint had certainly struck for him.

That is the true story of the vow and the building of the cathedral, a tale too old for even the venerable church to remember. But all the long history of the seven centuries since it knows, and indeed it has played such. a part in scene after scene and act after act, that a memory would have to be of some poorer stuff than hewed sandstone to forget a past so stirring. And who can be so far behind every scene as the house which during men's. lives listens to their prayers, and at last upon a day takes them in for ever?

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 on 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 Swein Asleifson, he who kidnapped Paul and afterwards became the lifelong and, on the whole, faithful friend of Rognvald, and the faithless enemy of almost everyone 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 remark