After _Punch_ I must be permitted to work off several stories which have been King Charles’s Heads unto me since I began to compile this volume. They persisted in cropping up, now in some book which I was consulting, then in a newspaper, and next in conversation with acquaintances. I know all their variations so well now that I recognise them a long way off, and generally manage to avoid them. Four are particularly determined in keeping themselves to the front:— A wandered Celt found himself laid up in an hospital in America with a disease which fairly puzzled the physicians. They did not know what to do with their patient, for he seemed to be sinking into the grave for no reason whatever. They held a consultation, and decided as a last resource to try music, preferably bagpipe music, as the patient was a Scotsman. So every night for a fortnight a piper played in the lobbies of the hospital, and gradually the Celt began to revive. At the fortnight’s end he was well enough to be discharged, but—and this was the worst feature of the case—_all the other patients had died_. Once, I remember, that story hailed from the Crimea and referred to a dying soldier of Sir Colin Campbell’s, who was cured by the pipes in one hour. The music was, however, the death of forty-one of his comrades. The exact number killed varies from time to time, but that is a small matter. The incident is always the same. The last occasion on which it crossed my path was in the spring of 1900, when it appeared in the “London Letter” of a Glasgow evening paper, to which it had been telegraphed the same morning from the “City Notes” of one of the leading London dailies, each of the journalists concerned treating it as a great discovery in the field of humour. And I had been doing all I could to keep out of its way for about a year previously. The next also shows the wonderful powers of pipe music. Music, apparently, hath charms to soothe the savage _beast_. A Scotsman, a piper of course, lost his way on an American prairie, and was overtaken by a bear. To appease the brute Sandy threw it his modest lunch, the only food he had to keep him alive until he found shelter. But Bruin was not satisfied, and threatened to dine off Sandy himself, whereupon the piper thought he would play a farewell lament before quitting the world. So he struck up “Lochaber no more.” No sooner, however, did the big drone give its first squeal than the bear stood stock still, then turned and fled precipitously. Then Sandy exclaimed— “If she had known she was so fond of ta music, she could have had ta pipes before ta supper.” On its last round that story had reached Siberia, and the Celt, who was hungry, was pursued by a pack of wolves, who “fled with hideous howls” when the slogan of the clan was heard.