Playing within doors is a Lowland and English custom. In the Highlands the piper was always in the open air, and when people wished to dance to his music, it was on the green they danced. The pipe was no more intended for inside than are firearms. A broadside from a man-of-war has a fine effect when heard at a proper distance, but one would not care to be sitting by the muzzles when the guns went off. That the large pipes are still used in halls for entertainment purposes is accounted for by the strength of association, as much as by their appropriateness. Highlanders would not consider a gathering at all complete unless they had their pipers present—a feeling which is easily understood, and which no one wishes to see die out. But that does not alter the fact that, in a small apartment at any rate, they are entirely out of place. The writer is not likely soon to forget one experience of his own, which helped to confirm him in this opinion. It was in one of the big Glasgow halls at a Highland gathering, where I was, in a professional capacity, doing a “special” of several columns for a Highland paper. To catch that week’s issue, my “copy” had to be posted before I slept, so, as soon as the chairman had finished his speech, I adjourned to one of the very small rooms behind the platform to “write up” while the musical part of the programme proceeded, expecting to be pretty well through before the turn of the next speaker came. But the “association pipers” were there before me, and what must they do but shut all the doors to keep the sound from reaching the platform, and start practising the marches and reels they were to play later on, marching from end to end of the little apartment. In five minutes the big drone seemed to be vibrating all through my anatomy, while the melody danced to its own time among the crevices of my brain. It was impossible for me to take my fingers out of my ears—a position which did not lend itself to rapid writing or careful composition. But the pipers did not think anything about it (they had in fact stopped conversation and started playing because they “did not wish to disturb me”), and I soon made an excuse to go out. I tried the artistes’ room, but the soprano was doing up her hair, the comic man was arranging his somewhat scanty habilaments, the old violinist was telling funny stories, and I seemed so obviously out of place that I could not possibly start working. Next I tried the stair, but the draught was too much for me. Then I tried the concert hall itself, but the applause was so frequent that the desks were always rattling. So I came back to the pipers, and braved it out for half an hour, after which I went back to the concert hall and did it on my knee. Anything more indescribably disagreeable than that half-hour in the ante-room it is difficult to imagine, and there seems, when I think of it now, to have been no relation whatever between that “music” and the harmonies which used to