“‘I refer mysel’ to God’s pleasure and not to yours.’”
Whereupon, as in all other tales of the kind, at the mention of the sacred Name, “all was dark around him, and he sunk on the earth with such a sudden shock that he lost both breath and sense.” When he came round he was lying in the kailyard of Redgauntlet, and he would have thought the whole experience but a dream, only he had the receipt in his hand fairly written and signed by the auld laird, and dated “From my appointed place, this twenty-fifth day of November,” the previous day, in fact. This he carried to the new laird, who accepted it as evidence of the rent having been paid, but made Steenie swear never to divulge his adventure.
Away up in the north, too, we come across stories connected with caves into which pipers went. At Durness, in Sutherlandshire, a piper went into a cave and never returned. According to the version current in the locality, the Devil himself got hold of the venturesome explorer and kept him. From Caithness we get something better. A piper, in a spirit of braggadocia, as is often the case in these stories, entered a cave near Dunnet Head. Jock was “a stout, long-winded chap,”
“Who was a piper to his trade,
And by his trusty chanter earned his bread,”
and the fairies had often heard him play and wished to get him to take the place of their own piper, who had died. Though they were immortal themselves, they had not a piper of their own race, and when they got one from among mankind they could not make him immortal. Jock lived near a famous cave called Puddingoe, the inmost recesses of which no man had ever explored, and one day he laid a wager that he would play up Puddingoe and see how far it went.
“‘For,’ added Jock, ‘though Nick’s a roguish elf,
I canna think he’d harm a hair o’ me,
For he is just a piper like myself,
And dearly loves, I’m told, a funny spree—