This is a subject upon which it is impossible, without the most superhuman self-control, to write with calmness. Justice is supposed in this country to be meted out with an even hand. A humane maxim says, "Better let ten guilty men escape, than one innocent man suffer." Yet what have the public, especially of "quiet neighborhoods," done; what crimes have we committed; what retribution have we invoked; that we are to be visited with the indiscriminating punishment, the excruciating agony, squealed and screeched into our ears out of that instrument of ineffable torture, the Scotch bagpipe? If our neighbor be a slanderer, a screw, a giver of bad dinners, or any other sort of criminal for whom the law has provided no punishment and a bag-pipe serenade be your mode of revenge on him, shut him up with a piper or pipers in the padded room in Bedlam, or take him out to the Eddystone lighthouse; but for the love of mercy, do not make us, his unoffending neighbors, partakers of his probably just, but certainly condign punishment! We have, however, a better opinion of human nature than to believe in such extreme vindictiveness. We rather attribute these public performances of sonorous savagery to the perverted taste of a few unfortunate individuals, who pretend to relish the discords, and who actually pay the kilted executioners of harmony. The existence of such wretched amateurs might be doubted, if we did not remember that the most revolting propensities are to be found among mankind. There _are_ people who chew tobacco; a certain tribe of Polynesian aborigines deem assafoetida the most delicious of perfumes; and Southey, in his Travels in Spain, states that the Gallician carters positively refused to grease their wheels because of the delight the creaking gave them. Yet although the grating of wooden axles, or even the sharpening of saws, is music to the pibroch, it appears from a variety of evidence that bad taste can actually reach, even in the female mind, to the acme of encouraging and patronizing street bagpipers.