The bagpipe was also used to lighten labour. While the inhabitants of Skye were engaged in making roads in 1786, each party of workers had a piper, and in the North of Scotland men engaged in work requiring strength and unity of purpose, such as launching a large boat, had a piper to help them pull or lift together. In the harvest time a piper was often employed to animate the reapers, keeping them working in time to the music, like a file of soldiers, he himself following behind the slowest worker. This custom is alluded to in Hamilton’s elegy on Habbie Simpson, the piper of Kilbarchan:— “Or wha will cause our shearers shear? Wha will bend up the brags of weir?” The dance of the kirn or harvest home was always danced with peculiar glee by the reapers of the farm where the harvest was first finished. On these occasions they danced on an eminence in full view of as many other reapers as possible, to the music of the Lowland bagpipe, commencing the dance with loud shouts of triumph and tossing their hooks in the air. The dance was retained for a time by Highlanders visiting the South of Scotland as harvesters, but it has now been more than a century in disuetude. In a poem of great antiquity, called _Cockilby’s Sow_, which describes such a dance, we are told that— “Davy Doyte of the dale, Was thair mad menstrale, He blew on a pype he Maid of a borit bourtre.” Also that— “Olarus the lang clype Playit on a bag pype.” In a manuscript of the seventeenth century, a song descriptive of shepherd life says— “The life of a shepherd is void of all care, With his bag and his bottle he maketh good fare; He hath yon green meadow to walk in at will-a, With a pair of fine bagpipes upon a green hill-a; Tringdilla, tringdilla, tring down-adown dilla, With a pair of fine bagpipes upon a green hill-a.”