The piper was a professional gentleman, a skilled musician, who went to college, and had a seat at the table with his chief. As a favoured retainer, he enjoyed certain perquisites. When, for instance, an animal was slaughtered for the family of the chief, a certain part of the carcase was allotted to the piper. When the civil wars broke up the clan system, the chiefs ceased to keep hereditary pipers, and the race soon became extinct. Afterwards, when a man considered he had enough of this world’s goods to warrant the expenditure, and felt that he would like to hark back a little to the ways of the fathers, he got the best piper he could, just as he got any other servant. In this way the system of family pipers is perpetuated, and will be so as long as the Sovereign and others of high rank set the example. The pipes took an important part in the enjoyments of Highlanders. They were always to the front at weddings or where the people were making merry. An old time poet puts it plainly, if rather quaintly, when he says:— “A braithel where the broth was fat, In ancient times a token sure, The bridegroom was na reckoned poor; A vast o’ fouk a’ roun about Came to the feast then dined thereout, Twa pair o’ pipers playing gade About the table as they fed.” Our present day equivalent for this verse is much better rhyme, if farther from the truth:— “At the wedding of Shon Mac Lean, ’Twas wet and windy weather, Yet through the wind and rain Cam twenty pipers together! Erach and Dugald Dhu, Sandy of Isla, too, Each with his bonnet of blue, And every piper was fou, Twenty pipers together.” The pipers, however, could not have been very “fou,” at least until after the wedding, for, “The twenty pipers at break of day In twenty different bog-holes lay, Serenely sleeping on their way From the wedding of Shon Mac Lean.” Had they been totally incapable they could hardly have got to twenty different “bog-holes.” It is difficult to define exactly the meaning of the phrases, “as drunk as a piper” and “as fou as a piper,” but they seem to have generally meant half seas over, not helplessly inebriated. The piper, being an important social personage, could hardly escape the reproach of being addicted to liquor, although there is nothing to show that his class were in this respect any worse than the average of the people of their day. [Illustration: HIGHLAND FAMILY PARTY RETURNING FROM A FAIR AFTER A DANCE—_Sketched from Nature. 1829._ ]