This dreadful thought spurred them to instant action.  By way of mutual encouragement they went together through the sculptured doorway, that bore the arms of the ancient guild of the candlemakers on the lintel, and into the carting office on the front.

“Do ye ken Greyfriars Bobby?” Tammy asked, timidly, of the man in charge.

He glowered at the laddie and shook his head.  “Havers, mannie; there’s no’ onybody named for an auld buryin’ groond.”

The children fled.  There was no use at all in wasting time on folk who did not know Bobby, for it would take too long to explain him.  But, alas, they soon discovered that “maist ilka body” did not know the little dog, as they had so confidently supposed.  He was sure to be known only in the rooms at the rear that overlooked the kirkyard, and, as one went upward, his identity became less and less distinct.  He was such a wee, wee, canny terrier, and so many of the windows had their views constantly shut out by washings.  Around the inner courts, where unkempt women brought every sort of work out to the light on the galleries and mended worthless rags, gossiped, and nursed their babies on the stairs, Bobby had sometimes been heard of, but almost never seen.  Children often knew him where their elders did not.  By the time Ailie and Tammy had worked swiftly down to the bottom of the Row other children began to follow them, moved by the peril of the little dog to sympathy and eager sacrifice.

“Bide a wee, Ailie!” cried one, running to overtake the lassie.  “Here’s a penny.  I was gangin’ for milk for the porridge.  We can do wi’oot the day.”

And there was the money for the broth bone, and the farthing that would have filled the gude-man’s evening pipe, and the ha’penny for the grandmither’s tea.  It was the world-over story of the poor helping the poor.  The progress of Ailie and Tammy through the tenements was like that of the piper through Hamelin.  The children gathered and gathered, and followed at their heels, until a curiously quiet mob of threescore or more crouched in the court of the old hall of the Knights of St. John, in the Grassmarket, to count the many copper coins in Tammy’s woolen bonnet.

“Five shullin’s, ninepence, an’ a ha’penny,” Tammy announced.  And then, after calculation on his fingers, “It’ll tak’ a shullin’ an’ twapenny ha’penny mair.”

There was a gasping breath of bitter disappointment, and one wee laddie wailed for lost Bobby.  At that Ailie dashed the tears from her own eyes and sprang up, spurred to desperate effort.  She would storm the all but hopeless attic chambers.  Up the twisting turnpike stairs on the outer wall she ran, to where the swallows wheeled about the cornices, and she could hear the iron cross of the Knights Templars creak above the gable.  Then, all the way along a dark passage, at one door after another, she knocked, and cried,

“Do ye ken Greyfriars Bobby?”