It may sound irreverent to connect the bagpipe with religious ordinances, though why one form of musical instrument should be deemed sacred and another profane is a hard question. To the modern Highlander a blast from the pipes on Sunday would be considered enough to bring a curse on the whole land, but our forefathers were not all so strict. They worked references to the pipes into the architecture of many of their churches, particularly in England and on the Continent. In St. James’s Church, Norwich, there used to be a window on which a piper was shown with a bagpipe with one drone; under a stall in Ripon Cathedral there is carved in oak a representation of two hogs dancing to a third playing on a bagpipe; in Beverley Minster, a group of pigs is carved in wood, all dancing round a trough to the music of one of their number, who plays a bagpipe having two drones and one chanter; among the numerous carvings in Westminster Abbey, there is a woodland scene representing a group of monkeys along with a bear, the latter playing the bagpipe; and in St. John’s Church, Cirencester, a monkey is depicted playing on the bagpipe. Then at Rosslyn and in Melrose Abbey, we have the pieces of architecture mentioned in a previous chapter.[9] Perhaps the most curious of these semi-ecclesiastical carvings is a representation of an ass playing on a bagpipe, which is graven on an ancient tombstone in the Cathedral Church of Hamburg. The animal walks on its hind legs, holding the instrument between its forelegs, and carved on the stone are the words— Footnote 9: See pages 37 and 45. “The vicissitudes of the world compel me, Poor ass, to learn the bagpipe.” Pipers, apparently, were not rich then more than they are now. It is difficult to understand why sculptors should have connected sacred architecture with animals in the way they did. Artists, like poets, have a license, but this hardly accounts for their associating the pig, which never was venerated in any way, with sacred things. The carvings, however, while hardly respectful to the instrument, associate it, if only in a sarcastic way, with ecclesiastical affairs, and show that the foolish prejudice which considers the pipes profane did not always exist. It is possible that the connection between the pipes and churches was confined to ecclesiastical carvings, but as to that we cannot now speak definitely. The early reformers in their reforming zeal practised vandalism, and in rooting out the religion they wished to supersede, they left us but fragments of an architecture we would now have been glad to preserve. The references to the bagpipe in churches are so fragmentary it is impossible to draw any very reliable inference.