thickly studded with sugar plums of rainbow colours, invitingly
poisonous; strings of tin covers for tobacco pipes, overlapping each
other like fish scales; toys, and tapes, and needles, and twenty
other kinds of things, all huddled together.

Turning the corner of this house, he went down the narrow passage
between it and the next, and in at its open door. But the moment
it was entered it lost all appearance of a shop, and the room with
the tempting window showed itself only as a poor kitchen with an
earthen floor.

"Weel, hoo did the pipes behave themsels the day, daddy?" said the
youth as he strode in.

"Och, she'll pe peing a coot poy today," returned the tremulous
voice of a grey headed old man, who was leaning over a small peat
fire on the hearth, sifting oatmeal through the fingers of his left
hand into a pot, while he stirred the boiling mess with a short
stick held in his right.

It had grown to be understood between them that the pulmonary
conditions of the old piper should be attributed not to his internal,
but his external lungs--namely, the bag of his pipes. Both sets
had of late years manifested strong symptoms of decay, and decided
measures had had to be again and again resorted to in the case of
the latter to put off its evil day, and keep within it the breath
of its musical existence. The youth's question, then, as to
the behaviour of the pipes, was in reality an inquiry after the
condition of his grandfather's lungs, which, for their part, grew
yearly more and more asthmatic: notwithstanding which Duncan MacPhail