“Preserve us a’!  Lassie, he’s been tak’n by the Laird Provost an’ gien the name o’ the auld kirkyaird.  He’s an ower grand doggie.  Ma puir bairnie, dinna greet so sair!” For the little girl suddenly released the wee Highlander and sobbed on her mother’s shoulder.

“He isna ma ain Bobby ony mair!” She “couldna thole” to watch him as he tumbled down the brae.

On the outward march, among the many dogs and laddies that had followed the soldiers, Bobby escaped notice.  But most of these had gone adventuring in Swanston Dell, to return to the city by the gorge of Leith Water.  Now, traveling three miles to the soldiers’ one, scampering in wide circles over the fields, swimming burns, scrambling under hedges, chasing whaups into piping cries, barking and louping in pure exuberance of spirits, many eyes looked upon him admiringly, and discontented mouths turned upward at the corners.  It is not the least of a little dog’s missions in life to communicate his own irresponsible gaiety to men.

If the return had been over George IV Bridge Bobby would, no doubt, have dropped behind at Mr. Traill’s or at the kirkyard.  But on the Burghmuir the troops swung eastward until they rounded Arthur’s Seat and met the cavalry drilling before the barracks at Piershill.  Such pretty maneuvering of horse and foot took place below Holyrood Palace as quite to enrapture a terrier.  When the infantry marched up the Canongate and High Street, the mounted men following and the bands playing at full blast, the ancient thoroughfare was quickly lined with cheering crowds, and faces looked down from ten tiers of windows on a beautiful spectacle.  Bobby did not know when the bridge-approach was passed; and then, on Castle Hill, he was in an unknown region.  There the street widened to the great square of the esplanade.  The cavalry wheeled and dashed down High Street, but the infantry marched on and up, over the sounding drawbridge that spanned a dry moat of the Middle Ages, and through a deep-arched gateway of masonry.

The outer gate to the Castle was wider than the opening into many an Edinburgh wynd; but Bobby stopped, uncertain as to where this narrow roadway, that curved upward to the right, might lead.  It was not a dark fissure in a cliff of houses, but was bounded on the outer side by a loopholed wall, and on the inner by a rocky ledge of ascending levels.  Wherever the shelf was of sufficient breadth a battery of cannon was mounted, and such a flood of light fell from above and flashed on polished steel and brass as to make the little dog blink in bewilderment.  And he whirled like a rotary sweeper in the dusty road and yelped when the time-gun, in the half-moon battery at the left of the gate and behind him, crashed and shook the massive rock.