“Alas! for him my Heart is sair, For of his Springs I gat a skair, At every Play, Race, Feast, and Fair But Guile or Greed We need not look for Pyping mair, Fen Habbie’s dead.” Besides those mentioned, there were other notable performers, who might, by a slight stretch of language, be called burgh pipers. There was for instance the Piper of Bridgeton, William Gunn, who published a book of pipe music. He died in 1876 at the age of seventy-eight years. He was well known in the east-end of Glasgow, and was engaged by the inhabitants of Bridgeton to play through their streets in the early morning, and thus usher in the new day. This was, of course, before Bridgeton was absorbed by the big city, and when it had some social existence of its own. Gunn was piper to the Glasgow Gaelic Club for a time, and kept a school for pipers. The register of this school, which was kept with great care, would be an interesting document if it could be got, for among his pupils were many who became well-known pipers. Then there was also Neil Blane, the worthy town piper of Lanark, so well described by Scott in _Old Mortality_. Neil, when introduced to the reader, is “mounted on his white Galloway, armed with his dirk and broadsword, and bearing a chanter, streaming with as many ribbons as would deck out six country belles for a fair or preaching.” He could not very well have ribbons streaming from his “chanter,” but let that pass. It is one of these liberties that Scott sometimes takes in matters of detail. Neil was town-piper of——(why is the town not named directly?), and had all the emoluments of his office—the Piper’s Croft, a field of an acre in extent, five merks and a new livery coat of the town’s colours yearly, some hopes of a dollar upon the day of the election of magistrates, and the privilege of paying at all the respectable houses in the neighbourhood a visit at spring-time to rejoice their hearts with his music, and to beg from each a modicum of seed corn. Besides, he kept the principal change-house in the burgh, was a good-humoured, shrewd, selfish sort of fellow, indifferent alike to the disputes about Church and State, and anxious only to secure the goodwill of customers. His advice to “Jenny” as to how the change-house should be conducted makes amusing reading, and illustrates the character very forcibly. Neil, however, must have been a creature of the novelist’s imagination, for there is no trace of him in the burgh records or in local traditions.