Greyfriars Bobby
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I.
When the time-gun boomed from Edinburgh Castle, Bobby gave a
startled yelp. He was only a little country dog--the very
youngest and smallest and shaggiest of Skye terriers-bred on a
heathery slope of the Pentland hills, where the loudest sound was
the bark of a collie or the tinkle of a sheep-bell. That morning
he had come to the weekly market with Auld Jock, a farm laborer,
and the Grassmarket of the Scottish capital lay in the narrow
valley at the southern base of Castle Crag. Two hundred feet
above it the time-gun was mounted in the half-moon battery on an
overhanging, crescent-shaped ledge of rock. In any part of the
city the report of the one-o'clock gun was sufficiently alarming,
but in the Grassmarket it was an earth-rending explosion directly
overhead. It needed to be heard but once there to be registered
on even a little dog's brain. Bobby had heard it many times, and
he never failed to yelp a sharp protest at the outrage to his
ears; but, as the gunshot was always followed by a certain happy
event, it started in his active little mind a train of pleasant
associations.
In Bobby's day of youth, and that was in 1858, when Queen
Victoria was a happy wife and mother, with all her bairns about
her knees in Windsor or Balmoral, the Grassmarket of Edinburgh
was still a bit of the Middle Ages, as picturesquely decaying and
Gothic as German Nuremberg. Beside the classic corn exchange, it
had no modern buildings. North and south, along its greatest
length, the sunken quadrangle was faced by tall, old,
timber-fronted houses of stone, plastered like swallows' nests to
the rocky slopes behind them.
Across the eastern end, where the valley suddenly narrowed to the
ravine-like street of the Cowgate, the market was spanned by the
lofty, crowded arches of George IV Bridge. This high-hung,
viaduct thoroughfare, that carried a double line of buildings
within its parapet, leaped the gorge, from the tall, old, Gothic
rookeries on High Street ridge, just below the Castle esplanade.
It cleared the roofs of the tallest, oldest houses that swarmed
up the steep banks from the Cowgate, and ran on, by easy descent,
to the main gateway of Greyfriars kirkyard at the lower top of
the southern rise.
Greyfriars' two kirks formed together, under one continuous roof,
a long, low, buttressed building without tower or spire. The new
kirk was of Queen Anne's day, but the old kirk was built before
ever the Pilgrims set sail for America. It had been but one of
several sacred buildings, set in a monastery garden that sloped
pleasantly to the open valley of the Grassmarket, and looked up
the Castle heights unhindered. In Bobby's day this garden had
shrunk to a long, narrow, high-piled burying-ground, that
extended from the rear of the line of buildings that fronted on
the market, up the slope, across the hilltop, and to where the
land began to fall away again, down the Burghmuir. From the
Grassmarket, kirk and kirkyard lay hidden behind and above the
crumbling grandeur of noble halls and mansions that had fallen to
the grimiest tenements of Edinburgh's slums. From the end of the
bridge approach there was a glimpse of massive walls, of pointed
windows, and of monumental tombs through a double-leafed gate of
wrought iron, that was alcoved and wedged in between the ancient
guildhall of the candlemakers and a row of prosperous little
shops in Greyfriars Place.
A rock-rimmed quarry pit, in the very heart of Old Edinburgh, the
Grassmarket was a place of historic echoes. The yelp of a little
dog there would scarce seem worthy of record. More in harmony
with its stirring history was the report of the time-gun. At one
o'clock every day, there was a puff of smoke high up in the blue
or gray or squally sky, then a deafening crash and a back fire
fusillade of echoes. The oldest frequenter of the market never
got used to it. On Wednesday, as the shot broke across the babel
of shrill bargaining, every man in the place jumped, and not one
was quicker of recovery than wee Bobby. Instantly ashamed, as an
intelligent little dog who knew the import of the gun should be,
Bobby denied his alarm in a tiny pink yawn of boredom. Then he
went briskly about his urgent Business of finding Auld Jock.
The market was closed. In five minutes the great open space was
as empty of living men as Greyfriars kirkyard on a week-day.
Drovers and hostlers disappeared at once into the cheap and noisy
entertainment of the White Hart Inn that fronted the market and
set its squalid back against Castle Rock. Farmers rapidly
deserted it for the clean country. Dwellers in the tenements
darted up wynds and blind closes, climbed twisting turnpike
stairs to windy roosts under the gables, or they scuttled through
noble doors into foul courts and hallways. Beggars and
pickpockets swarmed under the arches of the bridge, to swell the
evil smelling human ri
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