“Laddie, do you know whaur’s a doctor who can be had for a shulling or two for a poor auld country body in my shop?”

“Is he so awfu’ ill?” Geordie asked with the morbid curiosity of lusty boyhood.

“He’s a’ that.  He’s aff his heid.  Run, laddie, and dinna be standing there wagging your fule tongue for naething.”

Geordie was off with speed across the bridge to High Street.  Mr. Traill struggled back to his shop, against wind and treacherous ice, thinking what kind of a bed might be contrived for the sick man for the night.  In the morning the daft auld body could be hurried, willy-nilly, to a bed in the infirmary.  As for wee Bobby he wouldn’t mind if—­

And there he ran into his own wide-flung door.  A gale blew through the hastily deserted place.  Ashes were scattered about the hearth, and the cruisey lamp flared in the gusts.  Auld Jock and Bobby were gone.

III.

Although dismayed and self-accusing for having frightened Auld Jock into taking flight by his incautious talk of a doctor, not for an instant did the landlord of Greyfriars Dining-Rooms entertain the idea of following him.  The old man had only to cross the street and drop down the incline between the bridge approach and the ancient Chapel of St. Magdalen to be lost in the deepest, most densely peopled, and blackest gorge in Christendom.

Well knowing that he was safe from pursuit, Auld Jock chuckled as he gained the last low level.  Fever lent him a brief strength, and the cold damp was grateful to his hot skin.  None were abroad in the Cowgate; and that was lucky for, in this black hole of Edinburgh, even so old and poor a man was liable to be set upon by thieves, on the chance of a few shillings or pence.

Used as he was to following flocks up treacherous braes and through drifted glens, and surefooted as a collie, Auld Jock had to pick his way carefully over the slimy, ice-glazed cobble stones of the Cowgate.  He could see nothing.  The scattered gas-lamps, blurred by the wet, only made a timbered gallery or stone stairs stand out here and there or lighted up a Gothic gargoyle to a fantastic grin.  The street lay so deep and narrow that sleet and wind wasted little time in finding it out, but roared and rattled among the gables, dormers and chimney-stacks overhead.  Happy in finding his master himself again, and sniffing fresh adventure, Bobby tumbled noisily about Auld Jock’s feet until reproved.  And here was strange going.  Ancient and warring smells confused and insulted the little country dog’s nose.  After a few inquiring and protesting barks Bobby fell into a subdued trot at Auld Jock’s heels.

To this shepherd in exile the romance of Old Edinburgh was a sealed book.  It was, indeed, difficult for the most imaginative to believe that the Cowgate was once a lovely, wooded ravine, with a rustic burn babbling over pebbles at its bottom, and along the brook a straggling path worn smooth by cattle on their driven way to the Grassmarket.  Then, when the Scottish nobility was crowded out of the piled-up mansions, on the sloping ridge of High Street that ran the mile from the Castle to Holyrood Palace, splendor camped in the Cowgate, in villas set in fair gardens, and separated by hedge-rows in which birds nested.