The earth wears ever a threefold garment of beauty.  The human person usually manages to miss nearly everything but the appearance of things.  A few of us are so fortunate as to have ears attuned to the harmonies woven on the wind by trees and birds and water; but the tricky weft of odors that lies closest of all, enfolding the very bosom of the earth, escapes us.  A little dog, traveling with his nose low, lives in another stratum of the world, and experiences other pleasures than his master.  He has excitements that he does his best to share, and that send him flying in pursuit of phantom clues.

From the top of the Burghmuir it was easy going to Bobby.  The snow had gone off in a thaw, releasing a multitude of autumnal aromas.  There was a smell of birch and beech buds sealed up in gum, of berries clotted on the rowan-trees, and of balsam and spice from plantations of Highland firs and larches.  The babbling water of the burn was scented with the dead bracken of glens down which it foamed.  Even the leafless hedges had their woody odors, and stone dykes their musty smell of decaying mosses and lichens.

Bobby knew the pause at the toll-bar in the valley, and the mixed odors of many passing horses and men, there.  He knew the smells of poultry and cheese at a dairy-farm; of hunting dogs and riding-leathers at a sportsman’s trysting inn, and of grist and polluted water at a mill.  And after passing the hilltop toll-bar of Fairmilehead, dipping across a narrow valley and rounding the base of a sentinel peak, many tame odors were left behind.  At the buildings of the large, scattered farms there were smells of sheep, and dogs and barn yards.  But, for the most part, after the road began to climb over a high shoulder of the range, there was just one wild tang of heather and gorse and fern, tingling with salt air from the German Ocean.

When they reached Cauldbrae farm, high up on the slope, it was entirely dark.  Lights in the small, deep-set windows gave the outlines of a low, steep-roofed, stone farm-house.  Out of the darkness a little wind blown figure of a lassie fled down the brae to meet the cart, and an eager little voice, as clear as a hill-bird’s piping, cried out: 

“Hae ye got ma ain Bobby, faither?”

“Ay, lassie, I fetched ’im hame,” the farmer roared back, in his big voice.

Then the cart was stopped for the wee maid to scramble up over a wheel, and there were sweet little sounds of kissing and muffled little cuddlings under the warm plaid.  When these soft endearments had been attended to there was time for another yearning.

“May I haud wee Bobby, faither?”

“Nae, lassie, a bonny bit bairnie couldna haud ’im in ‘er sma’ airms.  Bobby’s a’ for gangin’ awa’ to leev in a grand kirkyaird wi’ Auld Jock.”

A little gasp, and a wee sob, and an awed question:  “Is gude Auld Jock deid, daddy?”

Bobby heard it and answered with a mournful howl.  The lassie snuggled closer to the warm, beating heart, hid her eyes in the rough plaid, and cried for Auld Jock and for the grieving little dog.