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