The Project Gutenberg EBook of Greyfriars Bobby, by Eleanor Atkinson

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Title: Greyfriars Bobby

Author: Eleanor Atkinson

Posting Date: December 8, 2008 [EBook #2693]
Release Date: July, 2001

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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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 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 Georg