hog-skin, filled with wind, having pipes at one end, and a jackass at
the other, and is known in some lands as the bagpipe. The small shrines
to the Virgin, particularly those in the streets where the wealthy
English reside, are played upon assiduously by the _pifferari_, who are
supposed by romantic travelers to come from the far-away Abbruzzi
Mountains, and make a pilgrimage to the Eternal City to fulfil a vow to
certain saints; whereas it is sundry cents they are really after. They
are for the most part artists' models, who at this season of the year
get themselves up _à la pifferari_, or piper, to prey on the romantic
susceptibilities and pockets of the strangers in Rome, and, with a pair
of long-haired goat-skin breeches, a sheepskin coat, brown rags, and
sandals, or _cioccie_, with a shocking bad conical black or brown hat,
in which are stuck peacock's or cock's feathers, they are ready equipped
to attack the shrines and the strangers.

Unfortunately for Caper there was a shrine to the Virgin in the
second-story front of the house next to where he lived; that is,
unfortunately for his musical ear, for the lamp that burned in front of
the shrine every dark night was a shining and pious light to guide him
home, and thus, ordinarily, a very fortunate arrangement. In the
third-story front room of the house of the shrine dwelt a Scotch artist
named MacGuilp, who was a grand amateur of these pipes, and who declared
that no sound in the world was so sweet to his ear as the bagpipes: they
recalled the heather, haggis, and the Lothians, and the mountain dew, ye
ken, and all those sorts of things.

One morning at breakfast in the Café Greco he discoursed at length about
the pleasure the pifferari gave him; while Caper, taking an opposite
view, said they had, during the last few days, driven him nearly crazy,
and he wished the squealing hog-skins well out of town.