“How ken ye I'm Strathlachlan and beardless?” asked Gilian.
“Strathlachlan by the smell of herring-scale from your side of the house (for they told me yesterday the gannets were flying down Strathlachlan way, and that means fishing), and you have no beard I know, but in what way I know I do not know.” Gilian had the siubhal of the pibroch but begun when the blind man stopped him.
“You have it,” he said, “you have it in a way, the Macarthur's way, and that's not my way. But, no matter, let us to our piping.”
The three men sat them down on three stools on the clay floor, and the blind man's pipes passed round between them.
“First,” said Paruig (being the man of the house, and to get the vein of his own pipes)—“first I'll put on them 'The Vaunting.'” He stood to his shanks, a lean old man and straight, and the big drone came nigh on the black rafters. He filled the bag at a breath and swung a lover's arm round about it. To those who know not the pipes, the feel of the bag in the oxter is a gaiety lost. The sweet round curve is like a girl's waist; it is friendly and warm in the crook of the elbow and against a man's side, and to press it is to bring laughing or tears.
The bothy roared with the tuning, and then the air came melting and sweet from the chanter. Eight steps up, four, to the turn, and eight down went Paruig, and the piobaireachd rolled to his fingers like a man's rhyming. The two men sat on, the stools, with their elbows on their knees, and listened.
He played but the urlar, and the crunluadh to save time, and he played them well.
“Good indeed! Splendid, my old fellow!” cried the two; and said Gilian, “You have a way of it in the crunluadh not my way, but as good as ever I heard.”
“It is the way of Padruig Og,” said Rory.
“Well I know it! There are tunes and tunes, and 'The Vaunting' is not bad in its way, but give me 'The Macraes' March.'”