The ghostly piper of Highland mythology was often seen mounted on a big black horse, while multitudes of voices sang round him, sometimes in light clothing and with long white staffs in their hands. In one instance—it comes from Dairy, in Ayrshire—“the sound of voices was terrible, and all struck in at the chorus. The tunes seemed to part and make way for the rider to get out, but, no, they closed again.” One such piper frequented the wild passes of Drumouchter, about the highest and most dreary part of the hills now crossed by the Highland Railway. At the hour of gloaming passers-by could hear the melancholy wailing of the pipes, but they never could tell from whence it came. Prince Charles Edward Stuart is alleged to have fought there a band of English cavalry, when on his retreat from Derby in 1745, and though his men won, the piper, if he was Prince Charlie’s piper, seems to have considered the incident a matter of perpetual mourning. Other sights and spectres, as of people engaged in mortal combat, are said to have been seen near the place. In a North Highland story, a “changeling” plays the pipes. A tailor went to a farmhouse to work, and just as he was going in, somebody put into his hands a child of a month old, which a little lady dressed in green seemed to be waiting to receive. The tailor ran home and gave the child to his wife. When he got back to the farmhouse, he found the farmer’s child crying and disturbing everybody. It was a fairy changeling which the nurse had taken in, meaning to give the farmer’s own child to the fairy in exchange, but nobody knew this but the tailor. When they were all gone out, he began to talk to the child. “Hae ye your pipes?” said the tailor. “They’re below my head,” said the changeling. “Play me a spring,” said the tailor. Out sprang the little man and played the bagpipe round the room. Then there was a noise outside, and the elf said, “It’s my folk wanting me,” and away he went up the chimney, and then they fetched back the farmer’s own child from the tailor’s house. Apart from their connection with supernatural beings or supernatural agencies, the pipes have at various times in the history of Scotland been credited with supernatural power. The “Lost Pibroch” itself is an echo, but a magnificently worded echo, of the old connection between the pipes and the supernatural. In it we have something like a modern literary curiosity, a Highland story written in the true Highland ring and spirit, and yet as splendid an intellectual treat to a non-Highland reader as he can get anywhere in the King’s English. It exaggerates the power of the pipes, but it is an exaggeration that is fully in unison with the nature of the people, and it is the gem of all the stories of pipers and the supernatural. “Then here’s another for fortune,” said _Paruig Dall_, and he went through the woods with his pipes under his oxter, to follow those whom his notes had already set awandering.