y is sweet and
beautiful, and the sun is going down behind the castle. Some sea-gulls
are disporting on the rock outside, and, save for their jabbering cries,
and the boom of the sea from the red horizon, and the gentle plash of
the wavelets on the pebbles of the shore, nothing is heard but the slow
tones of the Bishop and the fishermen's deep _Amen_. Such was Bishop
Wilson's fishermen's service. It is gone; more's the pity.

SOME OLD LAWS

The spiritual laws of Man were no dead letters when Bishop Wilson
presided over its spiritual courts. He was good to illegitimate
children, making them legitimate if their parents married within two
years of their birth, and often putting them on the same level with
their less injured brothers and sisters where inheritance was in
question. But he was unmerciful to the parents themselves. There is
one story of his treatment of a woman which passes all others in its
tyranny. It is, perhaps, the only deep stain on his character. I thank
God that it can never have come to the ears of Victor Hugo. Told as Hugo
would have told it, surely it must have blasted for ever the name of a
good man. It is the dark story of Katherine Kinrade.

KATHERINE KINRADE

She was a poor ruin of a woman, belonging to Kirk Christ, but wandering
like a vagrant over the island. The fact of first consequence is, that
she was only half sane. In the language of the clergy of the time, she
"had a degree of unsettledness and defect of understanding." Thus she
was the sort of human wreck that the world finds it easy to fling away.
Katherine fell victim to the sin that was not her own. A child was born.
The Church censured her. She did penance in a white sheet at the church
doors. But her poor, dull brain had no power to restrain her. A second
child was born. Then the Bishop committed her for twenty-one days to
his prison at the Peel. Let me tell you what the place is like. It is
a crypt of the cathedral church. You enter it by a little door in the
choir, leading to a tortuous flight of steep steps going down. It is
a chamber cut out of the rock of the little island, dark, damp, and
noisome. A small aperture lets in the light, as well as the sound of
the sea beating on the rocks below. The roof, if you could see it in the
gloom, is groined and ribbed, and above it is the mould of many graves,
for in the old days bodies were buried in the choir. Can you imagine a
prison more terrible for any prisoner, the stronge