With cap’ring canter,
And aye their nimble feet beat true
To his sweet chanter.”
Among Border pipers, it may be added, the perfection of the art was supposed to consist of being able to sing, dance, and play—the Lowland pipe, of course—at the same time, and when the race became extinct there was lost with them many ancient melodies.
Of the burgh pipers of Scotland there is not one left. The nearest approach to a burgh piper is perhaps the town’s officer of Leith, who on the occasion of the opening of a new bandstand in 1899 was presented with a set of pipes.
CHAPTER XIII.
From the Seat of the Scorner.
“Then bagpipes of the loudest drones,
With snuffling broken-winded tones,
Whose blasts of air, in pocket shut