The Smothered Piper of the West Cliffs.
"Hush! hush! hush! Here comes the Bogie Man."
This was shouted out to me very loudly by a cheery golfing "Johnny," as I entered the merry smoking-room of the old 'Varsity Golf Club at Coldham Common, Cambridge, some years ago. "Draw in your arm-chair, light a cigar or a pipe, and tell us all [many celebrated actors were present] some of those wonderful bogie stories about dear St Andrews. It is the bogie time of the year, and you must remember I played the 'Bogie Man' for you in one of your big burlesques at St Andrews and Cupar some years ago, so fire away with the bogies, please, and be quick."
Then I reeled off a big lot of yarns: of the ghost, Thomas Plater, who murdered Prior Robert of Montrose on the dormitory staircase before vespers; of the nigger in a Fifeshire house, who is invisible himself, but maps out his bare footmarks on the floor of the painted gallery; of Sharpe's coach, which, being heard, betokens a death; of haunted old Balcomie ruined castle; of the murdered pedlar in our own South Street, who sweeps down with a chilly hand the cheeks of invaders to his haunted cellar; of the ghost that appeared in the house of Archbishop Ross, mentioned in Lyon's History; and of the terrible ghost in the Novum Hospitium, which so alarmed people that its dwelling had to be pulled down, and only a fragment of the building now remains. But they wanted to hear the tale of the "Ghostly Piper of the West Cliffs"; so I told them the legend as I had heard it years ago.
It seems that in the old days no houses existed on the Cliffs
