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Page 40
"Puir Bobby, puir wee Bobby!" she cried, and her tears fell on
the little tousled head. The caretaker strode abruptly away and
waited for the wifie in the shadow of the auld kirk. Bobby lifted
his muzzle and licked the caressing hand. Then he curled himself
up comfortably on the mound and went to sleep.
VIII.
In no part of Edinburgh did summer come up earlier, or with more
lavish bloom, than in old Greyfriars kirkyard. Sheltered on the
north and east, it was open to the moist breezes of the
southwest, and during all the lengthening afternoons the sun lay
down its slope and warmed the rear windows of the overlooking
tenements. Before the end of May the caretaker had much ado to
keep the growth in order. Vines threatened to engulf the circling
street of sepulchers in greenery and bloom, and grass to encroach
on the flower plots.
A half century ago there were no rotary lawnmowers to cut off
clover heads; and, if there had been, one could not have been
used on these dropping terraces, so populous with slabs and so
closely set with turfed mounds and oblongs of early flowering
annuals and bedding plants. Mr. Brown had to get down on his
hands and knees, with gardener's shears, to clip the turfed
borders and banks, and take a sickle to the hummocks. Thus he
could dig out a root of dandelion with the trowel kept ever in
his belt, consider the spreading crocuses and valley lilies,
whether to spare them, give a country violet its blossoming time,
and leave a screening burdock undisturbed until fledglings were
out of their nests in the shrubbery.
Mistress Jeanie often brought out a little old milking stool on
balmy mornings, and sat with knitting or mending in one of the
narrow aisles, to advise her gude-mon in small matters. Bobby
trotted quietly about, sniffing at everything with the liveliest
interest, head on this side or that, alertly. His business,
learned in his first summer in Greyfriars, was to guard the nests
of foolish skylarks, song-thrushes, redbreasts and wrens, that
built low in lilac, laburnum, and flowering currant bushes, in
crannies of wall and vault, and on the ground. It cannot but be a
pleasant thing to be a wee young dog, full of life and good
intentions, and to play one's dramatic part in making an old
garden of souls tuneful with bird song. A cry of alarm from
parent or nestling was answered instantly by the tiny, tousled
policeman, and there was a prowler the less, or a skulking cat
was sent flying over tomb and wall.
His duty done, without noise or waste of energy, Bobby returned
to lie in the sun on Auld Jock's grave. Over this beloved mound a
coverlet of rustic turf had been spread as soon as the frost was
out of the ground, and a bonny briar bush planted at the head.
Then it bore nature's own tribute of flowers, for violets,
buttercups, daisies and clover blossoms opened there and, later,
a spike or so of wild foxglove and a knot of heather. Robin
redbreasts and wrens foraged around Bobby, unafraid; swallows
swooped down from their mud villages, under the dizzy dormers and
gables, to flush the flies on his muzzle, and whole flocks of
little blue titmice fluttered just overhead, in their rovings
from holly and laurel to newly tasseled firs and yew trees.
The click of the wicket gate was another sort of alarm
altogether. At that the little dog slipped under the fallen
table-tomb and lay hidden there until any strange visitor had
taken himself away. Except for two more forced returns and
ingenious escapes from the sheepfarm on the Pentlands, Bobby had
lived in the kirkyard undisturbed for six months. The caretaker
had neither the heart to put him out nor the courage to face the
minister and the kirk officers with a plea for him to remain.
The little dog's presence there was known, apparently, only to
Mr. Traill, to a few of the tenement dwellers, and to the Heriot
boys. If his life was clandestine in a way, it was as regular of
hour and duty and as well ordered as that of the garrison in the
Castle.
When the time-gun boomed, Bobby was let out for his midday meal
at Mr. Traill's and for a noisy run about the neighborhood to
exercise his lungs and legs. On Wednesdays he haunted the
Grassmarket, sniffing at horses, carts and mired boots. Edinburgh
had so many shaggy little Skye and Scotch terriers that one more
could go about unremarked. Bobby returned to the kirkyard at his
own good pleasure. In the evening he was given a supper of
porridge and broo, or milk, at the kitchen door of the lodge, and
the nights he spent on Auld Jock's grave. The morning drum and
bugle woke him to the chase, and all his other hours were spent
in close attendance on the labors of the caretaker. The click of
the wicket gate was the signal for instant disappearance.
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