and more to the same purpose. Coll instantly took warning, turned his boats and fled. But the Campbells, in whose custody the piper was, also understood, and, some accounts say he had his fingers cut off, others that he was killed on the spot for his bravery in warning his friends. All agree that he spoke to Coll in the boats across an expanse of water by means of the pipes alone, and the tune has ever since been associated with the incident in which it originated. Then there is the story of “Women of this Glen,”[7] alleged to have been instrumental in warning some of the Mac Ians on the eve of Glencoe, and several others very similar. Footnote 7: See Index under _Bodaích nam Bríogais_. Some stories come from wars of a less remote date. A Scottish regiment, we are told, on a sunbaked plain in India, was being mowed down by some mysterious disease. The doctors could not tell what it was, but the kilties were being swept off by it, one by one. At last it was discovered. Away on the outskirts of the camp, in the short still gloaming of the Eastern evening, a group of the men had gathered round the regimental piper. Their heads were buried in their hands, and big hot tears rolled through their fingers. And the weird, wae strains of “Lochaber no more,” played more melancholy than ever, filled the air. They were dying of homesickness, and the bagpipe spoke to them of home and all that was there. Another Scottish regiment had been at the Cape for a long time, and the officers found that the bagpipe so affected the men as to make them unfit for duty. The men were homesick, and their music intensified this feeling, and it had to be stopped for a time. The men of course knew the tunes, and what they meant, but there is nothing to show that the same tunes played on another instrument would not have had the same effect. We had the old idea revived in all its beauty by one of the ablest of the war correspondents in the recent South African War. Mr. Julian Ralph, of the London _Daily Mail_, in a letter to his paper, spoke eloquently of the services rendered to the Highland Brigade by their pipers, and of the way in which the pipes spoke to the men and the men listened to the pipes. He was a stranger to the music, and at first he was not impressed by it. But gradually he came to like it, and to miss it when he was not within the range of the notes. Here is how he tells of the pipes speaking to the men:— “Then off strode the fresh player with the streamers floating from his pipes, with his hips swaying, his head held high, and his toes but touching the earth. Once I heard a man say, ‘Gi’ me the pipes, Sandy; I can tell ye what naebody has said,’—at least, those were the strange words I thought that I distinguished.” After General Wauchope was killed along with so many of his men at Magersfontein, the soldiers were for a time gloomy and dispirited.