float across the bay in the days long ago, when the piper at the big house tuned his pipes and played to the gentry as they sat at dinner, the while we boys lay prone on the grass and drank in all the twirling of his notes. But in the one case there was a mile of sea between and rocks and fields around, and a blue sky above. In the other, I seemed to be caged in with some mad thing that hammered at every panel for freedom. It was the Chevalier Neukomm, a very distinguished musician, who said, when asked for his opinion, “I don’t despise your pibrochs; they have in them the stirrings of rude, but strong, nature. When you traverse a Highland glen, you must not expect the breath of roses. You must be contented with the smell of heath. In like manner Highland music has its rude, wild charms.” And our own Professor Blackie puts it even better when he says:— “The gay ribboned bagpipes moaning away in melancholy coronachs, or rattling like hailstones to the clash of claymores on the backs of the fleeing Sassenachs. In this case at least— ‘’Tis distance lends enchantment to the sound.’ On this point no Highlander of good taste will disagree with you. The bagpipes belong to the open air as naturally as heather belongs to the hills and salmon to the sea-lochs. Men do not mend pens with Lochaber axes, or employ scene painters to decorate the lids of snuff-boxes.” As to the man who practises the ordinary pipes in an ordinary city apartment, with but the thickness of a brick dividing him from neighbours on either side, he is the worst enemy of his craft and worthy of all execration. The wise enthusiast will get a smaller set made for home use, having the lower part of each drone and the top of the chanter turned large enough to fit the stocks of the full-size pipes, so that one bag and the stocks in it does for both sets. These will not sound so loud as to disturb neighbours, and the performer can enjoy himself as well as with pipes of full size. It must have been of neighbours of a player on the large pipes that the Chicago jury was composed which tried an action for damages in 1899. A Scottish society was parading the streets to the martial skirl of the pipes, when they met a horseman, whose horse took fright and bolted, throwing the rider through a shop window. The subsequent action turned on the question of whether or not the pipes were musical instruments, and the jury decided that they were not. After which it may be well to conclude with the following verses by Mr. Patrick Mac Pherson, New York, contributed to the _Celtic Monthly_, always remembering the open air and giving allowance for the poet’s license:— “Away with your fiddles and flutes, As music for wedding or ball, Pianofortes, clarionettes, lutes— The bagpipe surpasses them all.