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Updated: July 17, 2025
I gathered fourteen of the best pipers and drummers I could find in all Scotland. I equipped them, gave them the Highland uniform, and sent them out, to travel over Britain skirling and drumming the wail of war through the length and breadth of the land. They were to go everywhere, carrying the shrieking of the pipes into the highways and the byways, and so they did. And I paid the bills.
"Oh, ay, as usual," said Gourlay "as usual." "John!" she cried in alarm, "you don't mean to take down the gun, do ye?" "Huts, you auld fule, what are you skirling for? D'ye think I mean to shoot the dog? Set back on your creepie and make less noise, will ye?" Ere he had driven a nail in the rafter John came in, and sat down by the fire, taking up the great poker, as if to cover his nervousness.
But whaur Tam hung there was naething but the craig, and the sea below, and the solans skirling and flying. It was a braw spring morn, and Tam whustled as he claught in the young geese. Mony's the time I heard him tell of this experience, and aye the swat ran upon the man. It chanced, ye see, that Tam keekit up, and he was awaur of a muckle solan, and the solan pyking at the line.
And not only did he throw a fly, but at the fourth or fifth cast a fish rose, and he played it with skirling reel and much advice and most complimentary excitement on the part of the whole good company and brought it skilfully within range of Stamp's landing-net. Never surely was trout spawned that begot such bliss in the heart of an angler!
I was gaeing alang wi' the yowes, and there was he and Drummielaw riding and gabbing. Sae there cam on a skirling and jumping wind and rain, and we a' gat under a tree, the yowes and the dogs and Glenfernie and Drummielaw and me. Then we changed gude day and they went on gabbing. And 'Nae, says Glenfernie, 'I am nae lawyer and I am nae sodger.
As it was, it was touch and go wi' Angus; for they were the bonny pipes, the grand, bonny pipes." "Do you mean to tell me, you would have murdered your brother for a skirling, screeching bagpipes?" I asked in horror. "Och! hardly that, man. Murder is no' a bonny name for it. I would just kind o' quietly have done awa' wi' him.
None the less, after listening to the skirling of the bagpipes and to the romantic ballads which were sung in Scotland she is said to have remarked with a sort of sigh: "Whenever I hear those ballads I feel that England belongs really to the Stuarts!"
"Robertson's done up," said he to himself; "thae young lads are aye sae thoughtless. What deevil could he hae to say to Jeanie Deans, or to ony woman on earth, that he suld gang awa and get his neck raxed for her? And this mad quean, after cracking like a pen-gun, and skirling like a pea-hen for the haill night, behoves just to hae hadden her tongue when her clavers might have dune some gude!
I was like a vessel luffing to escape a squall, he had come on me so quickly. "There it is, Simon the upbringing of you that would never own up to what you think only yourself know. Three weeks to sea now you've been with me, and never a gull you've seen skirling to the west'ard that your eyes haven't followed. By no mistake do you watch them flying easterly.
But then came in the story of my poor bairn, and my mother thought he wad be deaved wi' it's skirling, and she pat it away in below the bit bourock of turf yonder, just to be out o' the gate; and I think she buried my best wits with it, for I have never been just mysell since.
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