Although the bell of St. Giles was just striking the hour of
five, it was already entirely dark. A lamp-lighter, with ladder
and torch, was setting a double line of gas jets to flaring along
the lofty parapets of the bridge. If the Grassmarket was a quarry
pit by day, on a night of storm it was the bottom of a
reservoir. The height of the walls was marked by a luminous crown
from many lights above the Castle head, and by a student's dim
candle, here and there, at a garret window. The huge bulk of the
bridge cast a shadow, velvet black, across the eastern half of
the market.

Had not Bobby gone before and barked, and run back, again and
again, and jumped up on Auld Jock's legs, the man might never
have won his way across the drowned place, in the inky blackness
and against the slanted blast of icy rain. When he gained the
foot of Candlemakers Row, a crescent of tall, old houses that
curved upward around the lower end of Greyfriars kirkyard, water
poured upon him from the heavy timbered gallery of the Cunzie
Neuk, once the royal mint. The carting office that occupied the
street floor was closed, or Auld Jock would have sought shelter
there. He struggled up the rise, made slippery by rain and grime.
Then, as the street turned southward in its easy curve, there was
some shelter from the house walls. But Auld Jock was quite
exhausted and incapable of caring for himself. In the ancient
guildhall of the candlemakers, at the top of the Row, was another
carting office and Harrow Inn, a resort of country carriers. The
man would have gone in there where he was quite unknown or,
indeed, he might even have lain down in the bleak court that gave
access to the tenements above, but for Bobby's persistent and
cheerful barking, begging and nipping.