When Bobby lay down on Auld Jock’s grave, pellets of frozen snow were falling and the air had hardened toward frost.

VI.

Sleep alone goes far to revive a little dog, and fasting sharpens the wits.  Bobby was so tired that he slept soundly, but so hungry that he woke early, and instantly alert to his situation.  It was so very early of a dark winter morning that not even the sparrows were out foraging in the kirkyard for dry seeds.  The drum and bugle had not been sounded from the Castle when the milk and dustman’s carts began to clatter over the frozen streets.  With the first hint of dawn stout fishwives, who had tramped all the way in from the piers of Newhaven with heavily laden creels on their heads, were lustily crying their “caller herrin’.”  Soon fagot men began to call up the courts of tenements, where fuel was bought by the scant bundle:  “Are ye cauld?”

Many a human waif in the tall buildings about the lower end of Greyfriars kirkyard was cold, even in bed, but, in his thick underjacket of fleece, Bobby was as warm as a plate of breakfast toast.  With a vigorous shaking he broke and scattered the crust of snow that burdened his shaggy thatch.  Then he lay down on the grave again, with his nose on his paws.  Urgent matters occupied the little dog’s mind.  To deal with these affairs he had the long head of the canniest Scot, wide and high between the ears, and a muzzle as determined as a little steel trap.  Small and forlorn as he was, courage, resource and purpose marked him.

As soon as the door of the caretaker’s lodge opened he would have to creep under the fallen slab again.  To lie in such a cramped position, hour after hour, day after day, was enough to break the spirit of any warm blooded creature that lives.  It was an exquisite form of torture not long to be endured.  And to get his single meal a day at Mr. Traill’s place Bobby had to watch for the chance opening of the wicket to slip in and out like a thief.  The furtive life is not only perilous, it outrages every feeling of an honest dog.  It is hard for him to live at all without the approval and the cordial consent of men.  The human order hostile, he quickly loses his self-respect and drops to the pariah class.  Already wee Bobby had the look of the neglected.  His pretty coat was dirty and unkempt.  In his run across country, leaves, twigs and burrs had become entangled in his long hair, and his legs and underparts were caked with mire.

Instinctively any dog struggles to escape the fate of the outcast.  By every art he possesses he ingratiates himself with men.  One that has his usefulness in the human scheme of things often is able to make his own terms with life, to win the niche of his choice.  Bobby’s one talent that was of practical value to society was his hunting instinct for every small animal that burrows and prowls and takes toll of men’s labor.  In Greyfriars kirkyard was work to be done that he could do.  For quite three centuries rats and mice had multiplied in this old sanctuary garden from which cats were chased and dogs excluded.  Every breeze that blew carried challenges to Bobby’s offended nose.  Now, in the crisp gray dawn, a big rat came out into the open and darted here and there over the powdering of dry snow that frosted the kirkyard.