t Bobby fitted his mop of a black muzzle into the largest hole of his
wicker prison, and set his useful little nose to gathering news of his
whereabouts.

If it should happen to a dog in this day to be taken from Ye Olde
Greyfriars Dining-Rooms and carried southward out of Edinburgh there
would be two miles or more of city and suburban streets to be traversed
before coming to the open country. But a half century or more ago
one could stand at the upper gate of Greyfriars kirkyard or Heriot's
Hospital grounds and look down a slope dotted with semi-rustic houses,
a village or two and water-mills, and then cultivated farms, all the way
to a stone-bridged burn and a toll-bar at the bottom of the valley. This
hillside was the ancient Burghmuir where King James of old gathered a
great host of Scots to march and fight and perish on Flodden Field.

Bobby had not gone this way homeward before, and was puzzled by the
smell of prosperous little shops, and by the park-like odors from
college campuses to the east, and from the well-kept residence park
of George Square. But when the cart rattled across Lauriston Place he
picked up the familiar scents of milk and wool from the cattle and
sheep market, and then of cottage dooryards, of turned furrows and of
farmsteads.

The earth wears ever a threefold garment of beauty. The human person
usually manages to miss nearly everything but the appearance of things.
A few of us are so fortunate as to have ears attuned to the harmonies
woven on the wind by trees and birds and water; but the tricky weft of
odors that lies closest of all, enfolding the very bosom of the earth,
escapes us. A little dog, traveling with his nose low, lives in another
stratum of the world, and experiences other pleasures than his master.
He has excitements that he does his best to share, and that send him
flying in pursuit of phantom clues.

From the top of the Burghmuir it was easy going to Bobby. The snow had
gone off in a thaw, releasing a multitude of autumnal aromas. There was
a smell of birch and beech buds sealed up in gum, of berries clotted on
the rowan-trees, and of balsam and spice from plantations of Highland
firs and larches. The babbling water of the burn was scented with the
dead bracken of glens down which it foamed. Even the leafless hedges had
their woody odors, and stone dykes their musty smell of decaying mosses
and lichens.

Bobby knew the pause at the toll-bar in the valley, and the mixed o