There was a burial in Inverness in the seventeenth century where few besides Highlanders in their usual garb were present, and all the way before them a piper played, having his drones hung with streamers of crape. In 1737 at the funeral of an eminent performer in Ireland his cortege was preceded by “eight couple of pipers” playing a funeral dirge, and it is alleged that when Lord Lovat was condemned for participating in the rebellion of 1745, he desired that his body might be carried to Scotland for burial, saying “he had once made it a part of his will that all the pipers between Johnnie Groat’s House and Edinburgh should be invited to play at his funeral.” Rob Roy’s funeral in 1736 was the last for many years at which a piper occupied an official position, although we read that in 1820 the pipes were played at the funeral of Sir John Murray Macgregor, of Lanrick, and that in Edinburgh in 1835 a Highland corps attended the funeral of a sergeant, the piper playing “Lochaber no more.” In later years, however, the custom has been revived, and the piper now frequently accompanies military funerals or the funerals of those connected with the Highlands. When the then Sirdar entered Khartoum after the Battle of Omdurman, one of the first things he did was to hold a formal funeral service on the spot where General Gordon was murdered, the pipers playing a dirge and the Soudanese band playing the hero’s favourite hymn, “Abide with me.” In old times, if the poet Dunbar may be believed, the bagpipe was preferred to other forms of honouring the dead:— “I will na preistis for me sing, Na yit na bellis for me ring, Bot a bag pipe to play a spryng.” In connection with funerals it only remains to be added that at the magnificent ceremonial in February last (1901), when the body of Queen Victoria was conveyed from Osborne to Windsor, Her Majesty’s two Highland pipers had an honourable place in the procession. When the cortege left Osborne they played the dirge of the Black Watch, and later on they changed into “The Flowers of the Forest,” a tune that has been played over many a soldier’s grave. It was appropriate that the association of the Queen with the 42nd Royal Highlanders should be kept up to the last. In 1854, when the regiment was in Chobham Camp, Her Majesty and the Prince Consort visited them weekly, and the Queen was so pleased with the Highlanders that when she decided to have a piper, she chose Pipe-major Ross of the 42nd, who remained in her service until his death about ten years ago. Mr. James C. Campbell, the present royal pipe-major, was taken from the same regiment.