This antipathy towards their national music, showed itself very frequently among the “unco guid” of the Highlands. Two ministers in the north of Scotland were going along a country road in a gig towards a town where the following day was to be Communion Sunday. While on their way they heard the sound of pipe music in a field near a roadside cottage. They stopped the gig, and after listening intently to the notes of a pibroch, one of the good men jumped out, walked up to the piper, told him he was quite wrong with the tune, and said that if he (the piper) would lend him his pipes he would show him how the pibroch should be played. The piper, with some astonishment, consented, when the minister struck up the tune, and went through it in such a masterly manner that the piper was fairly overcome with delight, and thanked his reverend tutor. During the time the performance was going on the other minister sat in the carriage, quite horrified to see and hear what his fellow-traveller was about. When the piper minister returned to proceed on the journey, the other began a sermon on the wickedness of his conduct. The former replied that on hearing the piper perform he thought it his duty to correct him, as otherwise the false notes would be running in his head during the sermon, but now that he had played the tune he would think no more about it, and be able to preach a good sermon on the morrow. In this connection it is only fair to ministers to add that they were generally not nearly so prejudiced as their people, especially their elders, were. Elders nearly always professed more religious knowledge than ministers, and were always less tolerant of what did not agree with their own opinions. In one Highland parish not quite a hundred years ago, a few people set themselves up as judges of what was right and wrong, and let the exercise of their powers become such that a young man learning to play the pipes laid himself open to exclusion from church privileges. Happily we are long past that stage now. There is no denying, however, that at one time the race fell into disrepute. In _Cockilby’s Sow_, a poem already referred to,[11] the bagpipe is mentioned as appropriated to swine herds, and in 1641 a sarcastic writer tells us, “The troopers rode from citie to court and from court to country with their trumpets before them, which made the people run out to see them, as fast as if it had been the bagge-pype playing before the Beares.” Footnote 11: See page 155.