He was thought to be a “deffle of a dog” in the mess, where the non-com officers had tea at small writing and card tables.  They talked and laughed very fast and loud, tried Bobby out on all the pretty tricks he knew, and taught him to speak and to jump for a lump of sugar balanced on his nose.  They did not fondle him, and this rough, masculine style of pampering and petting was very much to his liking.  It was a proud thing, too, for a little dog, to walk out with the sergeant’s shining boots and twirled walkingstick, and be introduced into one strange place after another all around the Castle.

From tea to tattoo was playtime for the garrison.  Many smartly dressed soldiers, with passes earned by good behavior, went out to find amusement in the city.  Visitors, some of them tourists from America, made the rounds under the guidance of old soldiers.  The sergeant followed such a group of sight-seers through a postern behind the armory and out onto the cliff.  There he lounged under a fir-tree above St. Margaret’s Well and smoked a dandified cigar, while Bobby explored the promenade and scraped acquaintance with the strangers.

On the northern and southern sides the Castle wall rose from the very edge of sheer precipices.  Except for loopholes there were no openings.  But on the west there was a grassy terrace without the wall, and below that the cliff fell away a little less steeply.  The declivity was clothed sparsely with hazel shrubs, thorns, whins and thistles; and now and then a stunted fir or rowan tree or a group of white-stemmed birks was stoutly rooted on a shelving ledge.  Had any one, the visitors asked, ever escaped down this wild crag?

Yes, Queen Margaret’s children, the guide answered.  Their father dead, in battle, their saintly mother dead in the sanctuary of her tiny chapel, the enemy battering at the gate, soldiers had lowered the royal lady’s body in a basket, and got the orphaned children down, in safety and away, in a fog, over Queen’s Ferry to Dunfirmline in the Kingdom of Fife.  It was true that a false step or a slip of the foot would have dashed them to pieces on the rocks below.  A gentleman of the party scouted the legend.  Only a fox or an Alpine chamois could make that perilous descent.

With his head cocked alertly, Bobby had stood listening.  Hearing this vague talk of going down, he may have thought these people meant to go, for he quietly dropped over the edge and went, head over heels, ten feet down, and landed in a clump of hazel.  A lady screamed.  Bobby righted himself and barked cheerful reassurance.  The sergeant sprang to his feet and ordered him to come back.