GREYFRIARS BOBBY

by Eleanor Atkinson




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