She darted down the stairs, and presently returned with her own scanty bowl of breakfast porridge.  Bobby refused the food, but he looked at her so mournfully that the first tears of pity her unchildlike eyes had ever shed welled up.  She put out her hand timidly and stroked him.

It was just before the report of the time-gun that two policemen cleared the stairs, shrouded Auld Jock in his own greatcoat and plaid, and carried him down to the court.  There they laid him in a plain box of white deal that stood on the pavement, closed it, and went away down the wynd on a necessary errand.  The Bible-reader sat on an empty beer keg to guard the box, and Bobby climbed on the top and stretched himself above his master.  The court was a well, more than a hundred feet deep.  What sky might have been visible above it was hidden by tier above tier of dingy, tattered washings.  The stairway filled again, and throngs of outcasts of every sort went about their squalid businesses, with only a curious glance or so at the pathetic group.

Presently the policemen returned from the Cowgate with a motley assortment of pallbearers.  There was a good-tempered Irish laborer from a near-by brewery; a decayed gentleman, unsteady of gait and blear-eyed, in greasy frock-coat and broken hat; a flashily dressed bartender who found the task distasteful; a stout, bent-backed fagot-carrier; a drunken fisherman from New Haven, suddenly sobered by this uncanny duty, and a furtive, gaol-bleached thief who feared a trap and tried to escape.

Tailed by scuffling gamins, the strange little procession moved quickly down the wynd and turned into the roaring Cowgate.  The policemen went before to force a passage through the press.  The Bible-reader followed the box, and Bobby, head and tail down, trotted unnoticed, beneath it.  The humble funeral train passed under a bridge arch into the empty Grassmarket, and went up Candlemakers Row to the kirkyard gate.  Such as Auld Jock, now, by unnumbered thousands, were coming to lie among the grand and great, laird and leddy, poet and prophet, persecutor and martyr, in the piled-up, historic burying-ground of old Greyfriars.

By a gesture the caretaker directed the bearers to the right, past the church, and on down the crowded slope to the north, that was circled about by the backs of the tenements in the Grassmarket and Candlemakers Row.  The box was lowered at once, and the pall-bearers hastily departed to delayed dinners.  The policemen had urgent duties elsewhere.  Only the Bible reader remained to see the grave partly filled in, and to try to persuade Bobby to go away with him.  But the little dog resisted with such piteous struggles that the man put him down again.  The grave digger leaned on his spade for a bit of professional talk.

“Many a dog gangs daft an’ greets like a human body when his maister dees.  They’re aye put oot, a time or twa, an’ they gang to folic that ken them, an’ syne they tak’ to ithers.  Dinna fash yersel’ aboot ’im.  He wullna greet lang.”