“I daur ye to gang up!” was all that was necessary to set any group of youngsters to scaling the precipice.  By every tree and ledge, by every cranny and point of rock, stoutly rooted hazel and thorn bush and clump of gorse, they climbed.  These laddies went up a quarter or a third of the way to the grim ramparts and came cautiously down again.  Bobby scrambled higher, tumbled back more recklessly and fell, head over heels and upside down, on the daisied turf.  He righted himself at once, and yelped in sharp protest.  Then he sniffed and busied himself with pretenses, in the elaborate unconcern with which a little dog denies anything discreditable.  There were legends of daring youth having climbed this war-like cliff and laying hands on the fortress wall, but Geordie expressed a popular feeling in declaring these tales “a’ lees.”

“No’ ony laddie could gang a’ the way up an’ come doon wi’ ’is heid no’ broken.  Bobby couldna do it, an’ he’s mair like a wild fox than an ordinar’ dog.  Noo, we’re the Light Brigade at Balaklava.  Chairge!”

The Crimean War was then a recent event.  Heroes of Sebastopol answered the summons of drum and bugle in the Castle and fired the hearts of Edinburgh youth.  Cannon all around them, and “theirs not to reason why,” this little band stormed out Queensferry Street and went down, hand under hand, into the fairy underworld of Leith Water.

All its short way down from the Pentlands to the sea, the Water of Leith was then a foaming little river of mills, twisting at the bottom of a gorge.  One cliff-like wall or the other lay to the sun all day, so that the way was lined with a profusion of every wild thing that turns green and blooms in the Lowlands of Scotland.  And it was filled to the brim with bird song and water babble.

A crowd of laddies had only to go inland up this gorge to find wild and tame bloom enough to bury “Jinglin’ Geordie” all over again every year.  But adventure was to be had in greater variety by dropping seaward with the bickering brown water.  These waded along the shallow margin, walked on shelving sands of gold, and, where the channel was filled, they clung to the rocks and picked their way along dripping ledges.  Bobby missed no chance to swim.  If he could scramble over rough ground like a squirrel or a fox, he could swim like an otter.  Swept over the low dam at Dean village, where a cup-like valley was formed, he tumbled over and over in the spray and was all but drowned.  As soon as he got his breath and his bearings he struck out frantically for the bank, shook the foam from his eyes and ears, and barked indignantly at the saucy fall.  The white miller in the doorway of the gray-stone, red-roofed mill laughed, and anxious children ran down from a knot of storybook cottages and gay dooryards.  “I’ll gie ye ten shullin’s for the sperity bit dog,” the miller shouted, above the clatter of the’ wheel and the swish of the dam.

“He isna oor ain dog,” Geordie called back.  “But he wullna droon.  He’s got a gude heid to ‘im, an’ wullna be sic a bittie fule anither time.”