No rain could wet Bobby.  Under his rough outer coat, that was parted along the back as neatly as the thatch along a cottage ridge-pole, was a dense, woolly fleece that defied wind and rain, snow and sleet to penetrate.  He could not know that nature had not been as generous in protecting his master against the weather.  Although of a subarctic breed, fitted to live shelterless if need be, and to earn his living by native wit, Bobby had the beauty, the grace, and the charming manners of a lady’s pet.  In a litter of prick-eared, wire-haired puppies Bobby was a “sport.”

It is said that some of the ships of the Spanish Armada, with French poodles in the officers’ cabins, were blown far north and west, and broken up on the icy coasts of The Hebrides and Skye.  Some such crossing of his far-away ancestry, it would seem, had given a greater length and a crisp wave to Bobby’s outer coat, dropped and silkily fringed his ears, and powdered his useful, slate-gray color with silver frost.  But he had the hardiness and intelligence of the sturdier breed, and the instinct of devotion to the working master.  So he had turned from a soft-hearted bit lassie of a mistress, and the cozy chimney corner of the farm-house kitchen, and linked his fortunes with this forlorn old laborer.

A grizzled, gnarled little man was Auld Jock, of tough fiber, but worn out at last by fifty winters as a shepherd on the bleak hills of Midlothian and Fife, and a dozen more in the low stables and storm-buffeted garrets of Edinburgh.  He had come into the world unnoted in a shepherd’s lonely cot.  With little wit of mind or skill of hand he had been a common tool, used by this master and that for the roughest tasks, when needed, put aside, passed on, and dropped out of mind.  Nothing ever belonged to the man but his scant earnings.  Wifeless, cotless, bairnless, he had slept, since early boyhood, under strange roofs, eaten the bread of the hireling, and sat dumb at other men’s firesides.  If he had another name it had been forgotten.  In youth he was Jock; in age, Auld Jock.

In his sixty-third summer there was a belated blooming in Auld Jock’s soul.  Out of some miraculous caprice Bobby lavished on him a riotous affection.  Then up out of the man’s subconscious memory came words learned from the lips of a long-forgotten mother.  They were words not meant for little dogs at all, but for sweetheart, wife and bairn.  Auld Jock used them cautiously, fearing to be overheard, for the matter was a subject of wonder and rough jest at the farm.  He used them when Bobby followed him at the plow-tail or scampered over the heather with him behind the flocks.  He used them on the market-day journeyings, and on summer nights, when the sea wind came sweetly from the broad Firth and the two slept, like vagabonds, on a haycock under the stars.  The purest pleasure Auld Jock ever knew was the taking of a bright farthing from his pocket to pay for Bobby’s delectable bone in Mr. Traill’s place.