But it was not in consonance with the dignity of a king that his guests should eat from off the pebbles, like so many fishermen, and when Mairi and another girl brought down the baskets, luncheon was placed in the stern of the small vessel, while Duncan got up the sails and put out from the stone quay. As for John the Piper, was he insulted for having been sent on a menial errand? They had scarcely got away from the shore when the sounds of the pipes were wafted to them from the hillside above, and it was the “Lament of Mackrimmon” that followed them out to sea: Mackrimmon shall no more return, Oh never, never more return! That was the wild and ominous air that was skirling up on the hillside; and Mackenzie’s face, as he heard it, grew wroth. “That teffle of a piper, John!” he said, “will be playing _Cha till mi tuiligh?_” “It is out of mischief, papa,” said Sheila--“that is all.” “It will be more than mischief if I burn his pipes and drive him out of Borva. Then there will be no more of mischief.” “It is very bad of John to do that,” said Sheila to Lavender, apparently in explanation of her father’s anger, “for we have given him shelter here when there will be no more pipes in all the Lewis. It was the Free Church ministers, they put down the pipes, for there was too much wildness at the marriages when the pipes would play.” “And what do the people dance to now?” asked the young gentleman, who seemed to resent this paternal government. Sheila laughed in an embarrassed way. “Miss Mackenzie would rather not tell you,” said Ingram. “The fact is, the noble mountaineers of these districts have had to fall back on the Jew’s harp. The ministers allow the instrument to be used--I suppose because there is a look of piety in the name. But the dancing doesn’t get very mad when you have two or three young fellows playing a strathspey on a bit of a trembling wire.” “That teffle of a piper John!” growled Mackenzie, under his breath; and so the Maighdean-mhara lightly sped on her way, opening out the various headlands of the islands, until at last she got into the narrows by Eilean-Aird-Meinish, and ran up the long arm of the sea to Mevaig. They landed and went up the rocks. They passed two or three small white houses overlooking the still, green waters of the sea, and then, following the line of a river, plunged into the heart of a strange and lonely district, in which there appeared to be no life. The river track took them up a green glen, the sides of which were about as sheer as a railway cutting. There were no trees or bushes about, but the green pasture along the bed of the valley wore its brightest colors in the warm sunlight, and far up on the hillsides the browns and crimsons of the heather and the silver gray of the rocks trembled in the white haze of the heat. Over that again the blue sky, as still and silent as the world below.