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Six pipers played within ten paces of him, each of them arrayed in the full panoply of the clan; at least a dozen dogs yelped their exultation; and from the surrounding throng two ancient men in tartan and four visions in snowy white stepped forth to greet the distinguished visitors. The first hitch in the proceedings occurred at this point.
It would be such a day as this, he chose, with the sun upon his braid and the sheen upon his horse's neck. The pipers would play merrily and yet with a melancholy too, and so crowded the causeways by the waiting community that even the windows must be open to their overflowing. And as thus he walked and dreamt saying no word to any of the chattering bairns about him he was truly the Army's child.
We should need a volume to describe all the sights of this wondrous fair, the church crowded with worshippers, the halt and sick praying for healing, the churchyard full of traders, the sheriff proclaiming new laws, the young men bowling at ninepins, pedlars shouting their wares, players performing the miracle play on a movable stage, bands of pipers, lowing oxen, neighing horses, and bleating sheep.
He went by Princes Street enjoying the mild sunshine, and the little thrill of easterly wind that tossed the flags along that terrace of palaces, and tumbled the green trees in the garden. The band was playing down in the valley under the castle; and when it came to the turn of the pipers, he heard their wild sounds with a stirring of the blood.
A myriad bens around gave mists, as smoke from a censer, to the day. The Athole pipers high-breastedly strutted with a vain port up and down their lines and played incessantly. MacDonald and O'Kyan led the Irish on the wings. In the plain we could see Argile's forces in a somewhat similar order, with the tartan as it should be in the midst of the bataille and the Lowland levies on the flanks.
Her Majesty wrote warmly of her host that "he was one of the kindest and best of men." After luncheon the country people danced jigs in the park, the men in their thick coats, the women in their shawls; one man, "a regular Irishman, with his hat on, one ear," the music furnished by three old and tattered pipers. Her Majesty pronounced the steps of the dancers "very droll."
All the pipers and the players and panderers to vice, the mountebanks, the sensual men, and the lawless women poured into the presence of the king, who had been too long deprived of the pleasure that his nature craved. Parliament voted seventy thousand pounds for a memorial to Charles's father, but the irresponsible king spent the whole sum on the women who surrounded him.
The yawning fairy slept meanwhile under the swaying meadowsweet, and the butterflies fanned him with their soft wings; but, alas! it could not have been the hour for dancing on the fairy ring, nor the proper time for the fairy pipers, and long, long as I looked I saw and heard nothing more than what I have told you.
Here on the fountain are Beauty and the Beast, Beauty clad in a summer hat and nothing else, the Beast clothed in ugliness. This is Beauty, and Beauty needs no story. Four airy pipers, suggestive at least of the song of the cicada on long, hot afternoons, support the fountain figure.
Up through the heather climbed the pipers, up through the heather the children clambered after them, and the moment the pipers passed the heather a door opened and they marched in, the children following, and the door closed behind them.
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