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She disliked the excited faces, and the high voices skirling their battle-cries, and the silly business of committees, and the platform slang. She was sick and shy before the tremor and the surge of collective feeling; she loathed the gestures and the movements of the collective soul, the swaying and heaving and rushing forward of the many as one.
But I went with the clan in the year '45. The men marched with swords and firelocks, and some of them in brigades in the same set of tartan; they were not backward at the marching, I can tell you. And there were gentlemen from the Low Country, with their tenants mounted and trumpets to sound, and there was a grand skirling of war-pipes.
If the ripple did not rise from knuckles to elbows, he forced speed with a shout of 'Up-up, my men! Up-up! and gave orders for the regale to go round, or for the crews to shift, or for the Highland piper to set the bagpipes skirling. Hither, then, came Hendry from the Bay, the first Englishman to ascend the Saskatchewan. 'The mosquitoes are intolerable, he writes. 'We came to the French house.
Pipes were skirling, skirts fluttering, flags flapping; and as invitations had been issued to various magnates in the district, whether acquainted with the present peer or not, there were to be seen quite a number of dignified personages in divers shades of tartan, and parasols of all the hues in the rainbow. The Baron was in his element.
"Hand your tongue, ye skirling limmer!" said the officer who had acted as master of the ceremonies to this extraordinary performer, and who was rather scandalised at the freedom of her demeanour before a person of Mr. Sharpitlaw's importance "haud your tongue, or I'se gie ye something to skirl for!"
The pipers would begin to skirl and the drums to beat in a square, maybe, or near the railway station. And every time the skirling of the pipes would bring the crowd. Then the pipers would march, when the crowd was big enough, and lead the way always to the recruiting place.
The shriek of it was now like the skirling of a thousand bagpipes, again like the wailing of numberless lost souls. Inside, West snored heavily, his ill-shaped head drooping on the big barrel chest of the man. Jessie slept while Whaley kept guard. Later she would watch in her turn. There were moments when the gale died down, but only to roar again with a frenzy of increased violence.
A feckless loon of a Straven weaver, that has left his loom and his bein house to sit skirling on a cauld hill-side, had catched twa dragoon naigs, and he could neither gar them hup nor wind, sae he took a gowd noble for them baith I suld hae tried him wi' half the siller, but it's an unco ill place to get change in Ye'll find the siller's missing out o' Bothwell's purse."
Dame Elspeth, however, though drowned in tears, was not so unmindful of external affairs, but that she could find voice enough to tell the women and children without, to "leave their skirling, and look after the cows that she couldna get minded, what wi' the awfu' distraction of her mind, what wi' that fause slut having locked them up in their ain tower as fast as if they had been in the Jeddart tolbooth."
He was a big straight man, long of limb, broad of shoulder and inclined to a generous rotundity, and he swaggered so splendidly when he walked, and held up his bonneted head with such a dashing air, that he gave the distinct impression that the bagpipes were skirling out a gay march as he swung past.
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