1863 3°9 birds are of many kinds—puffins or sea-parrots, with particoloured beaks like masks ; skuas, the thieves of the ocean, that gain their meal by robbing gulls of theirs ; guillemots, tern with scarlet feet, divers dressed in black lace thrown over white satin, glaucous and other gulls. It is a veritable paradise of sea-fowl, for almost everywhere their breeding places are inaccessible to man. Bishop Hroi had two children, Peter, and a daughter, Astrid, who grew up along with Sverrir, and the cousins were warmly attached to each other. Gunnhild had been cook to King Sigurd Mouth, travelling about with him everywhere, for Sigurd liked to have his food well-dressed and toothsome. Bishop Hroi had set his heart on training his nephew to be an ecclesiastic. But it must be admitted—indeed, in after days, Sverrir himself allowed it—that he was unfitted to be a cleric. And yet he never forgot his scholarship, remembered and sang, even in the midst of battles, the old Church hymns, and, best of all, displayed towards his deadliest enemies a kindness and forgiveness unusual, one may almost say, unknown in that age of barbarity. He led a somewhat turbulent youth; nevertheless, his uncle trusted that he would sober with age, and with this hope ordained him deacon, and gave him his daughter Astrid to wife. It is a disputed point whether Sverrir were ever ordained priest. He certainly, in his Memoirs, says that he was so, and his enemies in after life delighted in designating him as a renegade priest. But he may merely have meant that he had become a cleric, and certain it is that Pope Innocent III, who at a later time hurled anathemas against him, after raking up every true, exaggerated, and false charge he could find to blacken his character, only accused him of having quitted the ecclesiastical profession without papal dispensation. For some years the crown of Norway had been usurped by a pretender, Harald Gille, and after the death of this adventurer his sons divided the kingdom between them, then fought and killed each other ; and when the last of these kings had been slaughtered, Magnus, great-grandson of Magnus Bare-feet, was proclaimed. His father, Erling, was a wealthy yeoman who had married a granddaughter of Bare-footed Magnus. It was against
