On a sudden there rose away before us towards the mouth of the glen the sound of a bagpipe. It came on the tranquil air with no break in its uproar, and after a preparatory tuning it broke into an air called "Cogadh no Sith"--an ancient braggart pibroch made by one Macruimen of the Isle of Skye,--a tune that was commonly used by the Campbells as a night-retreat or tattoo.
My heart filled with the strain. It gave me not only the simple illusion that I saw again the regimentals of my native country--many a friend and comrade among them in the shelter of the Castle of Inverlochy--but it roused in me a spirit very antique, very religious and moving too, as the music of his own land must in every honest Gael.
"_Cruachan_ for ever!" I said lightly to M'Iver, though my heart was full.
He was as much touched by that homely lilt as myself. "The old days, the old styles!" said he. "God! how that pibroch stings me to the core!" And as the tune came more clearly in the second part, or _Crunluadh_ as we call it, and the player maybe came round a bend of the road, my comrade stopped in his pace and added with what in another I might have thought a sob--"I've trudged the world; I have learned many bravadoes, so that my heart never stirred much to the mere trick of an instrument but one, and the _piob mhor_ conquers me. What is it, Colin, that's in us, rich and poor, yon rude cane-reeds speak so human and friendly to?"
"Tis the Gaelic," I said, cheered myself by the air. "Never a roar of the drone or a sob of the chanter but's in the Gaelic tongue."
"Maybe," said he, "maybe: I've heard the scholars like yourself say the sheepskin and the drones were Roman--that or Spanish, it's all one to me. I heard them at Boitzenburg when we gave the butt of the gun to Tilly's _soldadoes_, they played us into Holstein, and when the ditch of Stralsund was choked with the tartan of Mackay, and our lads were falling like corn before the hook, a Reay piper stood valiantly in front and played a salute. Then and now it's the pipes, my darling!"
"I would as lief have them in a gayer strain. My fondest memories are of reels I've danced to their playing," I said, and by now we were walking down the glen.
"And of one reel you danced," said he, quizzingly, "not more than two months gone in a town that was called Inneraora?"