The pibroch is properly a “pipe tune,” and its most legitimate form is the “gathering.” The gathering is a long piece of music composed on the occasion of some victory or other fortunate circumstance in the history of a clan, which, when played, is a warning to the troops to turn out. The lament and salute originated in a similar way, but should be used on specific occasions only. The three classes are now, however, treated as one, propriety being frequently so much discarded that the pieces are called marches, an entirely unwarranted change, considering the nature of the music. The bagpipe has its military music mostly composed for itself, and generally employed by regimental pipers for marching purposes, and there is no necessity either for using pibrochs as marches or for adapting for regimental purposes the music of other instruments as has been done to far too large an extent. Bagpipe music has also suffered greatly in popular estimation through the efforts of well-meaning but mistaken people to lift it out of its proper place and graft it on to city life and inside entertainments. It is not pleasant chamber music even to Highland ears unless played on chamber pipes. There are times and circumstances for everything, and there are few pleasures that will admit of being transplanted out of their own sphere. The “Haughs o’ Cromdale” was a grand thing at Dargai, and a sonata by Paderewski is all right before a fashionable audience in a big city, but to exchange them would only make both ridiculous. The old pipers could indeed so regulate their instruments as to make the music almost as sweet as that of the violin, but sweetness is not the outstanding feature of the bagpipe, and it is not fitted for private houses or any but the biggest of public halls. The hills themselves are its appropriate concert room, and among them it pervades the whole atmosphere, and becomes part of the air until one can hardly tell whence it comes. It makes rhythm with the breeze and chimes in with the rush of the torrent, and becomes part of the world in which it is produced. It suits the bare heath, the solitary cairn, the dark pass, the silent glen, and the mountain shrouded in mists as no music ever did or can do, and it is at its best floating across the silent loch or over the mountain stream, or round the rugged hillsides. It is a military and an outdoor instrument, and there is no justification for comparing pipe music with classical productions. It is like comparing taties and herring with wine jellies, or hoddin’ grey with broad cloth.