“Eh, man, he’ll no’ bide with me, or I’d be bargaining for him.  And he’ll no’ be permitted to live in the kirkyard.  I know naething in this life more pitiful than a masterless, hameless dog.”  And then, to delay the moment of parting with Bobby, who stopped crying and began to lick his hand in frantic appeal through a hole in the basket, Mr. Traill asked how Bobby came by his name.

“It was a leddy o’ the neeborhood o’ Swanston.  She cam’ drivin’ by Cauldbrae i’ her bit cart wi’ shaggy Shetlands to it an’ stapped at the dairy for a drink o’ buttermilk frae the kirn.  Syne she saw the sonsie puppy loupin’ at Auld Jock’s heels, bonny as a poodle, but mair knowin’.  The leddy gied me a poond note for ’im.  I put ‘im up on the seat, an’ she said that noo she had a smart Hieland groom to match ‘er Hieland steeds, an’ she flicked the ponies wi’ ‘er whup.  Syne the bit dog was on the airth an’ flyin’ awa’ doon the road like the deil was after ‘im.  An’ the leddy lauched an’ lauched, an’ went awa’ wi’oot ’im.  At the fut o’ the brae she was still lauchin’, an’ she ca’ed back:  ’Gie ’im the name o’ Bobby, gude mon.  He’s left the plow-tail an’s aff to Edinburgh to mak’ his fame an’ fortune.’  I didna ken what the leddy meant.”

“Man, she meant he was like Bobby Burns.”

Here was a literary flavor that gave added attraction to a man who sat at the feet of the Scottish muses.  The landlord sighed as he went back to the doorway, and he stood there listening to the clatter of the cart and rough-shod horse and to the mournful howling of the little dog, until the sounds died away in Forest Road.

Mr. Traill would have been surprised to know, perhaps, that the confines of the city were scarcely passed before Bobby stopped protesting and grieving and settled down patiently to more profitable work.  A human being thus kidnapped and carried away would have been quite helpless.  But Bobby fitted his mop of a black muzzle into the largest hole of his wicker prison, and set his useful little nose to gathering news of his whereabouts.

If it should happen to a dog in this day to be taken from Ye Olde Greyfriars Dining-Rooms and carried southward out of Edinburgh there would be two miles or more of city and suburban streets to be traversed before coming to the open country.  But a half century or more ago one could stand at the upper gate of Greyfriars kirkyard or Heriot’s Hospital grounds and look down a slope dotted with semi-rustic houses, a village or two and water-mills, and then cultivated farms, all the way to a stone-bridged burn and a toll-bar at the bottom of the valley.  This hillside was the ancient Burghmuir where King James of old gathered a great host of Scots to march and fight and perish on Flodden Field.

Bobby had not gone this way homeward before, and was puzzled by the smell of prosperous little shops, and by the park-like odors from college campuses to the east, and from the well-kept residence park of George Square.  But when the cart rattled across Lauriston Place he picked up the familiar scents of milk and wool from the cattle and sheep market, and then of cottage dooryards, of turned furrows and of farmsteads.