In fairies’ hillocks—Stories with a common origin—Sutherlandshire version—Away for a year—Harris piper and the fairies—Seven years away—Fairies helping pipers—Helping the Mac Crimmons—A boy piper—How the music went from Islay to Skye—Faust-like bargains—A Caithness story—A fairy piper. Pipers with a leaning towards the uncanny dealt largely with fairies, and in West Highland mythology piping is said to have been heard in fairies’ hillocks. “I know two sisters,” says a boy in a story of Skye— “one of them is a little deaf—and they heard a sound in a hill, and they followed the sound, and did they not sit and listen to the piping till they were seven times tired? There is no question about that.” We do not believe in those things now. Our forefathers did, however, and there seems to have been an idea that pipers were special favourites of the little harmless green-coated ones. It is, indeed, their association with fairies that provides the most interesting of all the stories about pipers. There are ever so many stories of their adventures in the fairies’ mounds and caves, and, like other classes of Celtic tales, they all run in one groove though they are located as far distant as Scotland is long. Like the story of _Faust_, where a man sells his soul for a period of worldly pleasure, so the story of the piper who goes to the fairies for a while, and sometimes comes back again, permeates all the literature of its class. It turns up all over Scotland, it has been heard often in Ireland, and even in the Scilly Isles it is known. It does not require much ingenuity to show that those legends have all been derived from one original story. The same remark, however, applies to the legendary lore of the entire Celtic race—Scottish, Irish and Continental. Divested of “trimmings” added by the passing of ages and the difference in circumstances, Celtic stories are found to have so much in common as to create strong presumptive evidence that the race must some time or other have lived together, a united people, a mighty scattering taking place afterwards, during which the Celts spread themselves over the world, carrying their folk-lore with them. That is one theory regarding the race, and this singular fact about its traditions is one of the strongest arguments in its favour.