alds went screaming to the roof; and finally when the walls
were beginning to rock, and the women were becoming terrified, the
Piper whirled down the aisle and swept out of the building on the high
tide of his song. The young men in the back of the hall followed him
in noisy hilarity, but he stopped for nobody. He went marching
straight up the village street towards home, the defiant notes rising
in a wild crescendo. And oh, how he blew with lungs of leather like
fifty pipers together, when he was passing the Methodist church!

Dr. McGarry called the audience to order with some difficulty, and the
rest of the performance went on quite decorously. And when the last
notes of the pipes died away in the hills, Marmaduke and Trooper
crawled from their hiding place and sat on the hall steps till the
programme was over, holding each other up.

"Gosh," whispered Marmaduke, wiping his eyes weakly. "Who'd 'a'
thought that a McDonald from Glenoro wouldn't know a Methodist church
when he saw one?"

"It was the sight o' the Temperance hall that turned his stomach,"
lamented Trooper. "We might 'a' known he'd shy at it."

The Piper played himself away up and out of Orchard Glen, vowing
solemnly, like the Minstrel Boy, that he would tear the cords of his
instrument asunder ere they should sound again within the hearing of
that traitorous community, a vow that old Lauchie was to live to see
broken, under very stirring circumstances.

But there were other cords torn asunder in Orchard Glen by the
unfortunate contingency of that fatal evening. The Hendersons and the
Browns, who had been lifelong friends, stopped speaking to each other;
Mr. Sinclair and Mr. Wylie met on the most frigidly polite terms; the
union choir, which was the pride of Tremendous K.'s heart and the glory
of Orchard Glen, fell to pieces, and a line of demarkation was drawn
carefully between the two denominations where so recently every one had
talked about church union.

Mrs. Johnnie Dunn did not allow whatever part her nephew and his chum
had in the affair to go unnoticed. She advertised it, and hinted that
perhaps the Piper was not so much to blame after all. Indeed the past
record of Trooper and Marmaduke afforded little weight in proving their
innocence, and public suspicion fastened upon them. Neither of them
took any pains to establish their innocence; indeed, Trooper secretly
wondered why they had never thought of planning the affair, and was
ra