ss be new to most readers. A
Sunday School jaunt had been arranged in an Ayrshire town, and the
children were all ready to go in carts to a field, some miles away, for
games and open-air junketing. Everyone was impatient to set out, but the
piper was late, and the procession of carts could not start without
music. The minister became impatient, and sent a youth to tell the piper
to hurry up. The boy, on coming to the piper's house, saw a woman
standing at the door, and addressed her in these words: "_Are you the
man-that-plays-the-pipes's wife?_"

SIXTEEN MEDALS.

Those who doubt the efficacy of self-lauding advertisement are refuted
by this story. A commercial traveller, representing a whisky firm,
craved an order from a small Highland innkeeper. "Come, Donald," he
said, "you must give me an order this time." "You will be getting no
order from me, for your whisky is no good whatever. Dewar of Perth has
got sixteen medals for his whisky; it is so good to drink, and makes
people drunk so nice and quiet. But _your firm never got a single medal
for filling folk fou_." The granting of medals for quiet and comely
intoxication is a brilliant, although droll, idea.

"SHE'S AULD, AND SHE'S THIN, AND SHE'LL KEEP."

In a lone isle of the West, funerals are functions that cannot be
celebrated (at least in the way consecrated tradition prescribes)
without ample dispensing of whisky among the mourners. As there is no
pier on the island, the steamer very frequently may not be able to call
for days, during the terrific gales of winter. The legitimate stores of
insular whisky thus occasionally become exhausted, and should a death
occur during the period of dearth, a very regrettable situation arises.
In the epigrammatic style of King James I., who used to say "_No bishop,
no king_," we might express the difficulty by saying _No whisky, no
funeral_. While a gale of exceptional ferocity was raging some winters
ago, an old woman passed away, and there was not enough whisky on the
island to bury her with credit. Her son scanned the angry sky and sea
daily, in the hope that the weather would show signs of clearing up.
After a week's blighted hopes, he still refused to sanction interment,
remarking, "_She's auld, and she's thin, and she'll keep_." Next day the
sea was calm, the _Dunara_ called, and the old lady got her _munera
pulveris_.

THE WILL O' THE DEAD.

The foregoing story suggested to one of the auditors the tale told i