lized by a dialect that had been music in the ears of his
ancestors. At that Private McLean danced a Highland fling for him, and
wee Bobby came near bursting with excitement. When the sergeant came up
to make a magnificent toilet for tea and for the evening in town, the
soldier expressed himself with enthusiasm.

"He iss a deffle of a dog, sir!"

He was thought to be a "deffle of a dog" in the mess, where the non-com
officers had tea at small writing and card tables. They talked and
laughed very fast and loud, tried Bobby out on all the pretty tricks he
knew, and taught him to speak and to jump for a lump of sugar balanced
on his nose. They did not fondle him, and this rough, masculine style of
pampering and petting was very much to his liking. It was a proud thing,
too, for a little dog, to walk out with the sergeant's shining boots
and twirled walkingstick, and be introduced into one strange place after
another all around the Castle.

From tea to tattoo was playtime for the garrison. Many smartly dressed
soldiers, with passes earned by good behavior, went out to find
amusement in the city. Visitors, some of them tourists from America,
made the rounds under the guidance of old soldiers. The sergeant
followed such a group of sight-seers through a postern behind the armory
and out onto the cliff. There he lounged under a fir-tree above St.
Margaret's Well and smoked a dandified cigar, while Bobby explored the
promenade and scraped acquaintance with the strangers.

On the northern and southern sides the Castle wall rose from the very
edge of sheer precipices. Except for loopholes there were no openings.
But on the west there was a grassy terrace without the wall, and below
that the cliff fell away a little less steeply. The declivity was
clothed sparsely with hazel shrubs, thorns, whins and thistles; and now
and then a stunted fir or rowan tree or a group of white-stemmed birks
was stoutly rooted on a shelving ledge. Had any one, the visitors asked,
ever escaped down this wild crag?

Yes, Queen Margaret's children, the guide answered. Their father dead,
in battle, their saintly mother dead in the sanctuary of her tiny
chapel, the enemy battering at the gate, soldiers had lowered the royal
lady's body in a basket, and got the orphaned children down, in safety
and away, in a fog, over Queen's Ferry to Dunfirmline in the Kingdom
of Fife. It was true that a false step or a slip of the foot would
have dashed them to piece