While the bells played "There Grows a Bonny Briarbush in Our Kale Yard," Auld Jock and Bobby slept.They slept while the tavern emptied itself of noisy guests and clattering crockery was washed at the dingy, gas-lighted windows that overlooked the cockpit.They slept while the cold fell with the falling day and the mist was whipped into driving rain.Almost a cave, between shelving rock and house wall, a gust of wind still found its way in now and then.At a splash of rain Auld Jock stirred uneasily in his sleep.Bobby merely sniffed the freshened air with pleasure and curled himself up for an other nap.
No rain could wet Bobby.Under his rough outer coat, that was parted along the back as neatly as the thatch along a cottage ridge-pole, was a dense, woolly fleece that defied wind and rain, snow and sleet to penetrate.He could not know that nature had not been as generous in protecting his master against the weather.Although of a subarctic breed, fitted to live shelterless if need be, and to earn his living by native wit, Bobby had the beauty, the grace, and the charming manners of a lady's pet.In a litter of prick-eared, wire-haired puppies Bobby was a "sport."It is said that some of the ships of the Spanish Armada, with French poodles in the officers' cabins, were blown far north and west, and broken up on the icy coasts of The Hebrides and Skye.Some such crossing of his far-away ancestry, it would seem, had given a greater length and a crisp wave to Bobby's outer coat, dropped and silkily fringed his ears, and powdered his useful, slate-gray color with silver frost.But he had the hardiness and intelligence of the sturdier breed, and the instinct of devotion to the working master.So he had turned from a soft-hearted bit lassie of a mistress, and the cozy chimney corner of the farm-house kitchen, and linked his fortunes with this forlorn old laborer.
A grizzled, gnarled little man was Auld Jock, of tough fiber, but worn out at last by fifty winters as a shepherd on the bleak hills of Midlothian and Fife, and a dozen more in the low stables and storm-buffeted garrets of Edinburgh.He had come into the world unnoted in a shepherd's lonely cot.With little wit of mind or skill of hand he had been a common tool, used by this master and that for the roughest tasks, when needed, put aside, passed on, and dropped out of mind.Nothing ever belonged to the man but his scant earnings.Wifeless, cotless, bairnless, he had slept, since early boyhood, under strange roofs, eaten the bread of the hireling, and sat dumb at other men's firesides.If he had another name it had been forgotten.In youth he was Jock; in age, Auld Jock.
In his sixty-third summer there was a belated blooming in Auld Jock's soul.Out of some miraculous caprice Bobby lavished on him a riotous affection.Then up out of the man's subconscious memory came words learned from the lips of a long-forgotten mother.They were words not meant for little dogs at all, but for sweetheart, wife and bairn.Auld Jock used them cautiously, fearing to be overheard, for the matter was a subject of wonder and rough jest at the farm.He used them when Bobby followed him at the plow-tail or scampered over the heather with him behind the flocks.He used them on the market-day journeyings, and on summer nights, when the sea wind came sweetly from the broad Firth and the two slept, like vagabonds, on a haycock under the stars.The purest pleasure Auld Jock ever knew was the taking of a bright farthing from his pocket to pay for Bobby's delectable bone in Mr.Traill's place.
Given what was due him that morning and dismissed for the season to find such work as he could in the city, Auld Jock did not question the farmer's right to take Bobby "back hame." Besides, what could he do with the noisy little rascal in an Edinburgh lodging? But, duller of wit than usual, feeling very old and lonely, and shaky on his legs, and dizzy in his head, Auld Jock parted with Bobby and with his courage, together.With the instinct of the dumb animal that suffers, he stumbled into the foul nook and fell, almost at once, into a heavy sleep.Out of that Bobby roused him but briefly.
Long before his master awoke, Bobby finished his series of refreshing little naps, sat up, yawned, stretched his short, shaggy legs, sniffed at Auld Jock experimentally, and trotted around the bed of the cart on a tour of investigation.This proving to be of small interest and no profit, he lay down again beside his master, nose on paws, and waited Auld Jock's pleasure patiently.A sweep of drenching rain brought the old man suddenly to his feet and stumbling into the market place.The alert little dog tumbled about him, barking ecstatically.The fever was gone and Auld Jock's head quite clear; but in its place was a weakness, an aching of the limbs, a weight on the chest, and a great shivering.
Although the bell of St.Giles was just striking the hour of five, it was already entirely dark.A lamp-lighter, with ladder and torch, was setting a double line of gas jets to flaring along the lofty parapets of the bridge.If the Grassmarket was a quarry pit by day, on a night of storm it was the.bottom of a reservoir.The height of the walls was marked by a luminous crown from many lights above the Castle head, and by a student's dim candle, here and there, at a garret window.The huge bulk of the bridge cast a shadow, velvet black, across the eastern half of the market.
Had not Bobby gone before and barked, and run back, again and again, and jumped up on Auld Jock's legs, the man might never have won his way across the drowned place, in the inky blackness and against the slanted blast of icy rain.When he gained the foot of Candlemakers Row, a crescent of tall, old houses that curved upward around the lower end of Greyfriars kirkyard, water poured upon him from the heavy timbered gallery of the Cunzie Neuk, once the royal mint.The carting office that occupied the street floor was closed, or Auld Jock would have sought shelter there.He struggled up the rise, made slippery by rain and grime.
