Jock's
grave.

It was the birds that found him there in the misty dawn. They were used
to seeing Bobby scampering about, for the little watchman was awake and
busy as early as the feathered dwellers in the kirkyard. But, in what
looked to be a wet and furry door-mat left out overnight on the grass,
they did not know him at all. The throstles and skylarks were shy of it,
thinking it might be alive. The wrens fluffed themselves, scolded it,
and told it to get up. The blue titmice flew over it in a flock again
and again, with much sweet gossiping, but they did not venture nearer. A
redbreast lighted on the rose bush that marked Auld Jock's grave, cocked
its head knowingly, and warbled a little song, as much as to say: "If
it's alive that will wake it up."

As Bobby did not stir, the robin fluttered down, studied him from all
sides, made polite inquiries that were not answered, and concluded that
it would be quite safe to take a silver hair for nest lining. Then,
startled by the animal warmth or by a faint, breathing movement, it
dropped the shining trophy and flew away in a shrill panic. At that, all
the birds set up such an excited crying that they waked Tammy.

From the rude loophole of a window that projected from the old Cunzie
Neuk, the crippled laddie could see only the shadowy tombs and the long
gray wall of the two kirks, through the sunny haze. But he dropped his
crutches over, and climbed out onto the vault. Never before had Bobby
failed to hear that well-known tap-tap-tapping on the graveled path, nor
failed to trot down to meet it with friskings of welcome. But now he lay
very still, even when a pair of frail arms tried to lift his dead weight
to a heaving breast, and Tammy's cry of woe rang through the kirkyard.
In a moment Ailie and Mistress Jeanie were in the wet grass beside them,
half a hundred casements flew open, and the piping voices of tenement
bairns cried-down:

"Did the bittie doggie come hame?"

Oh yes, the bittie doggie had come hame, indeed, but down such perilous
heights as none of them dreamed; and now in what a woeful plight!

Some murmur of the excitement reached an open dormer of the Temple
tenements, where Geordie Ross had slept with one ear of the born doctor
open. Snatching up a case of first aids to the injured, he ran down the
twisting stairs to the Grassmarket, up to the gate, and around the kirk,
to find a huddled group of women and children weeping over a limp little
bundle o