I was at a wedding in the town of Inveraray,
Most wretched of weddings, with nothing but shell-fish,”
thus mercilessly lashing his churlish host. The wedding evidently was so poor that all the company got was limpets, and the song is another hit at the poverty of Inveraray. Burns echoed it when he wrote:—
“There’s naething here but Highland pride,
And Highland scab and hunger;
If Providence has sent me here
’Twas surely in his anger.”
The tradition, by the way, was so implicitly believed in, that the playing of the tune at a wedding, up to a comparatively recent date, was regarded as a premeditated insult.
One curious story is told of the tune. Not very many years ago the steamer Cygnet was sailing in a Highland loch when a sailor’s wife gave birth to twins. The fact was noticed more particularly because a few years before, in the same steamer, under the same captain, and at the same place, a similar event had taken place. On the first occasion the mother was a Mrs. Campbell, and, strangely enough, just when the twins were born, a piper on board happened to be playing vigorously “The Campbells are Coming,” quite ignorant of the additions that had just been made to the passenger list.
The tune was played by the 78th Highlanders when coming to the relief of Lucknow, and was that heard by Jessie of Lucknow—if there was such a person—as she lay half asleep on the ground.