_Dugald._—Now pray thee, piper, cease! That stunning din, Might do good service by the ears to set Two angry clans; but for a morning’s rouse, Here at an old man’s door, it does, good sooth, Exceed all reasonable use. The Earl Has passed a sleepless night; I pray thee now Give o’er and spare thy pains. _Piper._—And spare my pains, says’t thou—I’ll do mine office As long as breath within my body is. _Dugald._—Then mercy on us all! If wind thou mean’st, There is within that sturdy trunk of thine, Old as it is, a still exhaustless store. A Lapland witch’s bag could scarcely match it. Thou could’st, I doubt not, belly out the sails Of a three-masted vessel with thy mouth; But be thy mercy equal to thy might, I pray thee now give o’er, in faith the Earl Has passed a sleepless night. _Piper._—Think’st thou I’m a Lowland day-hired minstrel, To stop or play at bidding. Is Argyll The lord and chieftain of our ancient clan, More certainly than I to him as such, The high hereditary piper am? A sleepless night, forsooth! He’s slept full oft On the hard heath, with fifty harnessed steeds Champing their fodder round him—soundly too. I’ll do mine office, loun, chafe as thou wilt. And so on for a few more stanzas, till Argyll himself appears and puts an end to the discussion. But, after all, it is mostly non-Scotsmen who sneer at the pipes. They often understand as little of Scottish sentiment or Scottish music as did the Frenchman, who, after hearing “Tam o’ Shanter” recited, said it was “a story of how the devil came out of an old church and stole the tail from the horse of a farmer called Tam because he had played the pipes in the churchyard. I have heard,” he added, “play your pipes Scottish, and I would like well that some person would steal away all the pipes in Scotland.” Even our own William Black, the most inoffensive and delightful of latter-day writers, cannot resist the temptation to joke at the expense of the bagpipes. “Sermons,” he says, “are like Scottish bagpipes. They sound very well when one doesn’t hear them.” William Black, however, rarely if ever sneers, and this is very mild indeed, compared with what some other writers have thrown at the instrument.