Pipers were a resourceful race, if the following story is to be considered a typical one. A well-known piper, whose name is withheld because some of his people are still with us, was very often hard put to it for money, and many and various were the means he took to raise the wind. One day, more than usually dead-broke, he found an old mahogany leg of a table lying at the Clydeside, near Glasgow Green. He picked it up, and going to a joiner’s shop in the Briggate, he hired a turning lathe for an hour or two. Being an expert maker as well as player, he soon had an imitation set of drones and a chanter turned out of the mahogany. Then he got a piece of old skin and made a bag which would not have kept in small stones, not to speak of wind, and by means of borrowing pence from acquaintances, he raised some green velvet and ribbons. After he had carefully covered and adorned his “pipes,” he bored holes about an inch down the “drones,” stained the “virls” black, and gravely offered the lot to a pawnbroker. He, poor man, did not know much about pipes, for he gave the piper £1 on them. Then the dead-broke man repaid all his loans and went off a richer man by some seventeen or eighteen shillings. What the pawnbroker said when he attempted to sell the “pipes” has not come down to posterity. The best of the bagpipe stories, however, come from the regimental piper. Army pipers were, and perhaps still are, treated a little more leniently than their fellows. A piper of the 79th Cameron Highlanders was brought before the officer in command for being drunk. The officer was a bit of a wag, and on the delinquent being marched in he, looking very severe, said, “Are you the piper that played before Moses?” “Yes, sir,” said the piper, taking advantage of the familiarity. The officer was a bit nonplussed, and shouted, “Get out of here, you scoundrel, and never come before me again.” A day or so after the piper was again brought up for being drunk, and the officer, annoyed at seeing him back so soon, said, “I don’t wish to punish you, but if you continue coming before me I must treat you like any other delinquent.” Quoting from the defaulters’ sheet, he continued, “Drunk, drunk, drunk; why, sir, you’re always drunk. Look here, just put yourself in my position and see what you would do.” On the officer vacating the chair the piper, nothing daunted, took his place, and proceeding to scan his own defaulter sheet, said in grave tones, “Drunk, drunk, drunk. Why sir, you’re always drunk; I’ll give you seven days’ cells and twenty-eight days confined to barracks.” The officer was too amazed at the piper’s impudence to do more than shout at the top of his voice—“Sergeant-major, take this man out of here,” and as we have no record of any future infliction of punishment, we may infer that the piper’s game of bluff succeeded in getting him off scathless.