VIII.

In no part of Edinburgh did summer come up earlier, or with more lavish bloom, than in old Greyfriars kirkyard.  Sheltered on the north and east, it was open to the moist breezes of the southwest, and during all the lengthening afternoons the sun lay down its slope and warmed the rear windows of the overlooking tenements.  Before the end of May the caretaker had much ado to keep the growth in order.  Vines threatened to engulf the circling street of sepulchers in greenery and bloom, and grass to encroach on the flower plots.

A half century ago there were no rotary lawnmowers to cut off clover heads; and, if there had been, one could not have been used on these dropping terraces, so populous with slabs and so closely set with turfed mounds and oblongs of early flowering annuals and bedding plants.  Mr. Brown had to get down on his hands and knees, with gardener’s shears, to clip the turfed borders and banks, and take a sickle to the hummocks.  Thus he could dig out a root of dandelion with the trowel kept ever in his belt, consider the spreading crocuses and valley lilies, whether to spare them, give a country violet its blossoming time, and leave a screening burdock undisturbed until fledglings were out of their nests in the shrubbery.

Mistress Jeanie often brought out a little old milking stool on balmy mornings, and sat with knitting or mending in one of the narrow aisles, to advise her gude-mon in small matters.  Bobby trotted quietly about, sniffing at everything with the liveliest interest, head on this side or that, alertly.  His business, learned in his first summer in Greyfriars, was to guard the nests of foolish skylarks, song-thrushes, redbreasts and wrens, that built low in lilac, laburnum, and flowering currant bushes, in crannies of wall and vault, and on the ground.  It cannot but be a pleasant thing to be a wee young dog, full of life and good intentions, and to play one’s dramatic part in making an old garden of souls tuneful with bird song.  A cry of alarm from parent or nestling was answered instantly by the tiny, tousled policeman, and there was a prowler the less, or a skulking cat was sent flying over tomb and wall.

His duty done, without noise or waste of energy, Bobby returned to lie in the sun on Auld Jock’s grave.  Over this beloved mound a coverlet of rustic turf had been spread as soon as the frost was out of the ground, and a bonny briar bush planted at the head.  Then it bore nature’s own tribute of flowers, for violets, buttercups, daisies and clover blossoms opened there and, later, a spike or so of wild foxglove and a knot of heather.  Robin redbreasts and wrens foraged around Bobby, unafraid; swallows swooped down from their mud villages, under the dizzy dormers and gables, to flush the flies on his muzzle, and whole flocks of little blue titmice fluttered just overhead, in their rovings from holly and laurel to newly tasseled firs and yew trees.