Greyfriars Bobby | Page 4

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 river that flowed at the dark and slimy bottom of the
Cowgate.
A chill November wind tore at the creaking iron cross of the Knights of
St. John, on the highest gable of the Temple tenements, that turned its
decaying back on the kirkyard of the Greyfriars. Low clouds were
tangled and torn on the Castle battlements. A few horses stood about,
munching oats from feed-boxes. Flocks of sparrows fluttered down
from timbered galleries and rocky ledges to feast on scattered grain.
Swallows wheeled in wide, descending spirals from mud villages under
the cornices to catch flies. Rats scurried out of holes and gleaned in the
deserted corn exchange. And 'round and 'round the empty market-place
raced the frantic little terrier in search of Auld Jock.
Bobby knew, as well as any man, that it was the dinner hour. With the
time-gun it was Auld Jock's custom to go up to a snug little restaurant;
that was patronized chiefly by the decent poor small shopkeepers,
clerks, tenant farmers, and medical students living in cheap

lodgings--in Greyfriars Place. There, in Ye Olde Greyfriars
Dining-Rooms, owned by Mr. John Traill, and four doors beyond the
kirkyard gate, was a cozy little inglenook that Auld Jock and Bobby
had come to look upon as their own. At its back, above a recessed
oaken settle and a table, a tiny paned window looked up and over a
retaining wall into the ancient place of the dead.
The view of the heaped-up and crowded mounds and thickets of old
slabs and throughstones, girt all about by time-stained monuments and
vaults, and shut in on the north and east by the backs of shops and lofty
slum tenements, could not be said to be cheerful. It suited Auld Jock,
however, for what mind he had was of a melancholy turn. From his
place on the floor, between his master's hob-nailed boots, Bobby could
not see the kirkyard, but it would not, in any case, have depressed his
spirits. He did not know the face of death and, a merry little ruffian of a
terrier, he was ready for any adventure.
On the stone gate pillar was a notice in plain English that no dogs were
permitted in Greyfriars. As well as if he could read, Bobby knew that
the kirkyard was forbidden ground. He had learned that by bitter
experience. Once, when the little wicket gate that