‘Begone, you hallan shaker:
Jog on your gate, you bladder skate,
My name is Maggie Lauder.’”
—Old Scots Song.
Punch’s joke—King Charles’s heads—An amusing competition—A Highlander’s Irishism—Wedding experiences—A piper’s fall—A resourceful piper—A Cameron piper and his officer—“Lochaber no more”—An elephant’s objection—Embarked in a tub—Glasgow street scene—Bad player’s strategy—What the wind did—A new kind of tripe—A Pasha and a piper—A Gordon nervous—A jealous piper—Dougal Mac Dougal’s downfall.
Apart from the wilfully sarcastic humour exemplified in the previous chapter, there clings round the pipes a host of innocently laughable stories. Punch, the recognised pioneer of comic journalism, and always the ablest of that class of papers, has in its day had a number of jokes about the pipes, and, to do the writers and artists justice, they have always been enjoyable, even to the perfervid Scot, and not of the kind which does more to show the ignorance of the inventors than create a laugh. Punch’s humour is broad, but hardly ever offensive, and the picture by Charles Keene, reproduced on another page, may be taken as a fair sample. The drawing, which appeared on January 21st, 1871, shows the best art of the caricaturist wedded to the broadest and yet the most enjoyable humour. Charles Keene, by the way, was himself a performer on the pipes, which he studied thoroughly. On one occasion he was some distance from home seeing a sick friend, and, writing afterwards to London, he said: “My only solace was skirling away for an hour on the lonely beach, and I generally chose the most melancholy pibroch I could think of.” So he can hardly be accused of endeavouring to joke at the expense of the instrument.
After Punch I must be permitted to work off several stories which have been King Charles’s Heads unto me since I began to compile this volume. They persisted in cropping up, now in some book which I was consulting, then in a newspaper, and next in conversation with acquaintances. I know all their variations so well now that I recognise them a long way off, and generally manage to avoid them. Four are particularly determined in keeping themselves to the front:—
A wandered Celt found himself laid up in an hospital in America with a disease which fairly puzzled the physicians. They did not know what to do with their patient, for he seemed to be sinking into the grave for no reason whatever. They held a consultation, and decided as a last resource to try music, preferably bagpipe music, as the patient was a Scotsman. So every night for a fortnight a piper played in the lobbies of the hospital, and gradually the Celt began to revive. At the fortnight’s end he was well enough to be discharged, but—and this was the worst feature of the case—all the other patients had died.
Once, I remember, that story hailed from the Crimea and referred to a dying soldier of Sir Colin Campbell’s, who was cured by the pipes in one hour. The music was, however, the death of forty-one of his comrades. The exact number killed varies from time to time, but that is a small matter. The incident is always the same. The last occasion on which it crossed my path was in the spring of 1900, when it appeared in the “London Letter” of a Glasgow evening paper, to which it had been telegraphed the same morning from the “City Notes” of one of the leading London dailies, each of the journalists concerned treating it as a great discovery in the field of humour. And I had been doing all I could to keep out of its way for about a year previously.
The next also shows the wonderful powers of pipe music. Music, apparently, hath charms to soothe the savage beast. A Scotsman, a piper of course, lost his way on an American prairie, and was overtaken by a bear. To appease the brute Sandy threw it his modest lunch, the only food he had to keep him alive until he found shelter. But Bruin was not satisfied, and threatened to dine off Sandy himself, whereupon the piper thought he would play a farewell lament before quitting the world. So he struck up “Lochaber no more.” No sooner, however, did the big drone give its first squeal than the bear stood stock still, then turned and fled precipitously. Then Sandy exclaimed—