. In five minutes the great open space was as empty
of living men as Greyfriars kirkyard on a week-day. Drovers and hostlers
disappeared at once into the cheap and noisy entertainment of the White
Hart Inn that fronted the market and set its squalid back against Castle
Rock. Farmers rapidly deserted it for the clean country. Dwellers in the
tenements darted up wynds and blind closes, climbed twisting turnpike
stairs to windy roosts under the gables, or they scuttled through noble
doors into foul courts and hallways. Beggars and pickpockets swarmed
under the arches of the bridge, to swell the evil smelling human river
that flowed at the dark and slimy bottom of the Cowgate.

A chill November wind tore at the creaking iron cross of the Knights of
St. John, on the highest gable of the Temple tenements, that turned its
decaying back on the kirkyard of the Greyfriars. Low clouds were tangled
and torn on the Castle battlements. A few horses stood about, munching
oats from feed-boxes. Flocks of sparrows fluttered down from timbered
galleries and rocky ledges to feast on scattered grain. Swallows wheeled
in wide, descending spirals from mud villages under the cornices to
catch flies. Rats scurried out of holes and gleaned in the deserted corn
exchange. And 'round and 'round the empty market-place raced the frantic
little terrier in search of Auld Jock.

Bobby knew, as well as any man, that it was the dinner hour. With the
time-gun it was Auld Jock's custom to go up to a snug little restaurant;
that was patronized chiefly by the decent poor small shopkeepers,
clerks, tenant farmers, and medical students living in cheap
lodgings--in Greyfriars Place. There, in Ye Olde Greyfriars
Dining-Rooms, owned by Mr. John Traill, and four doors beyond the
kirkyard gate, was a cozy little inglenook that Auld Jock and Bobby
had come to look upon as their own. At its back, above a recessed oaken
settle and a table, a tiny paned window looked up and over a retaining
wall into the ancient place of the dead.

The view of the heaped-up and crowded mounds and thickets of old slabs
and throughstones, girt all about by time-stained monuments and vaults,
and shut in on the north and east by the backs of shops and lofty
slum tenements, could not be said to be cheerful. It suited Auld Jock,
however, for what mind he had was of a melancholy turn. From his place
on the floor, between his master's hob-nailed boots, Bobby could not see
the kirkyard, but it