eyes looked upon him admiringly, and
discontented mouths turned upward at the corners. It is not the least
of a little dog's missions in life to communicate his own irresponsible
gaiety to men.

If the return had been over George IV Bridge Bobby would, no doubt, have
dropped behind at Mr. Traill's or at the kirkyard. But on the Burghmuir
the troops swung eastward until they rounded Arthur's Seat and met
the cavalry drilling before the barracks at Piershill. Such pretty
maneuvering of horse and foot took place below Holyrood Palace as quite
to enrapture a terrier. When the infantry marched up the Canongate and
High Street, the mounted men following and the bands playing at full
blast, the ancient thoroughfare was quickly lined with cheering
crowds, and faces looked down from ten tiers of windows on a beautiful
spectacle. Bobby did not know when the bridge-approach was passed; and
then, on Castle Hill, he was in an unknown region. There the street
widened to the great square of the esplanade. The cavalry wheeled and
dashed down High Street, but the infantry marched on and up, over the
sounding drawbridge that spanned a dry moat of the Middle Ages, and
through a deep-arched gateway of masonry.

The outer gate to the Castle was wider than the opening into many an
Edinburgh wynd; but Bobby stopped, uncertain as to where this narrow
roadway, that curved upward to the right, might lead. It was not a dark
fissure in a cliff of houses, but was bounded on the outer side by a
loopholed wall, and on the inner by a rocky ledge of ascending levels.
Wherever the shelf was of sufficient breadth a battery of cannon was
mounted, and such a flood of light fell from above and flashed
on polished steel and brass as to make the little dog blink in
bewilderment. And he whirled like a rotary sweeper in the dusty road and
yelped when the time-gun, in the half-moon battery at the left of the
gate and behind him, crashed and shook the massive rock.

He barked and barked, and dashed toward the insulting clamor. The
dauntless little dog and his spirited protest were so out of proportion
to the huge offense that the guard laughed, and other soldiers ran out
of the guard houses that flanked the gate. They would have put the noisy
terrier out at once, but Bobby was off, up the curving roadway into the
Castle. The music had ceased, and the soldiers had disappeared over the
rise. Through other dark arches of masonry he ran. On the crest were
two ways