The skirling of ten pipers rent the air as they stepped out to the tune of Mac ’ic Eachainn’s March to Sheriffmuir, followed by the honoured guests, every man with a cromag nearly as tall as a window-pole.

“Enjoying this, Royde?” Ben Nevis asked.

“Why, I should say I am,” replied his guest, who had added to the brilliancy of his appearance by carrying an orange plaid over his shoulder. In fact to a casual glance it might have seemed for a moment that the right side of Ben Nevis was in eruption.

But not even that rumbustious voice could compete with ten pipers blowing full blast three or four yards in front of it, and the Chieftain was silent until he had taken his seat on the mound which overlooked the arena.

Then he observed as he had observed at the beginning of every Glenbogle Gathering for the last twenty-five years:

“Not so many here yet as there ought to be.”

There never had been and there never would be enough people with faith that games advertised to begin at ten o’clock would begin much before one o’clock. In any case except to piping experts the earlier part of the proceedings was a little dull, consisting as it did of the same example of ceòl mór—the classical music of the bagpipe—played by twelve pipers in turn on a wooden platform before which sat the judges with notebooks and pencils, marking the faults and merits of each performer’s grace-notes, slides and doublings. Kilwhillie was one of the judges; Colonel Lindsay-Wolseley was another; the third was a former pipe-major of the Glanranalds called Farquhar Macphail. It was noticeable that both Kilwhillie and the Colonel always ascertained his opinion of each performance first, and then after the very faintest camouflage of expert hesitation proceeded to agree with it. If Pipe-major Macphail had been a cynic he might have lured Kilwhillie or the Colonel into expressing a positive opinion of some performance before he gave his; but Pipe-major Macphail was not a cynic. Through twenty-one years’ service with The Duke of Clarence’s Own Clanranald Highlanders (The Inverness-shire Greens) he had preserved a simple belief in human nature.

“You’re not looking quite so well this beautiful morning, Kilwhillie,” he observed in an interval of silence while one of the competitors was intent upon his tuning slides. “No, sir, you’re not looking so well as usual.”

“I’m quite all right, Pipe-major,” said the laird, giving a listless tug at his moustache. He could not explain that a light remark of his lifelong friend and neighbour Ben Nevis was weighing very heavily upon his mind. Pipe-major Macphail was not to know that Ben Nevis had said he could not understand why he had advised Chester Royde to choose an orange kilt, and then had added, “You’ll have Ross on your trail, Hugh, when he hears about it.”