Given what was due him that morning and dismissed for the season to find such work as he could in the city, Auld Jock did not question the farmer’s right to take Bobby “back hame.”  Besides, what could he do with the noisy little rascal in an Edinburgh lodging?  But, duller of wit than usual, feeling very old and lonely, and shaky on his legs, and dizzy in his head, Auld Jock parted with Bobby and with his courage, together.  With the instinct of the dumb animal that suffers, he stumbled into the foul nook and fell, almost at once, into a heavy sleep.  Out of that Bobby roused him but briefly.

Long before his master awoke, Bobby finished his series of refreshing little naps, sat up, yawned, stretched his short, shaggy legs, sniffed at Auld Jock experimentally, and trotted around the bed of the cart on a tour of investigation.  This proving to be of small interest and no profit, he lay down again beside his master, nose on paws, and waited Auld Jock’s pleasure patiently.  A sweep of drenching rain brought the old man suddenly to his feet and stumbling into the market place.  The alert little dog tumbled about him, barking ecstatically.  The fever was gone and Auld Jock’s head quite clear; but in its place was a weakness, an aching of the limbs, a weight on the chest, and a great shivering.

Although the bell of St. Giles was just striking the hour of five, it was already entirely dark.  A lamp-lighter, with ladder and torch, was setting a double line of gas jets to flaring along the lofty parapets of the bridge.  If the Grassmarket was a quarry pit by day, on a night of storm it was the bottom of a reservoir.  The height of the walls was marked by a luminous crown from many lights above the Castle head, and by a student’s dim candle, here and there, at a garret window.  The huge bulk of the bridge cast a shadow, velvet black, across the eastern half of the market.

Had not Bobby gone before and barked, and run back, again and again, and jumped up on Auld Jock’s legs, the man might never have won his way across the drowned place, in the inky blackness and against the slanted blast of icy rain.  When he gained the foot of Candlemakers Row, a crescent of tall, old houses that curved upward around the lower end of Greyfriars kirkyard, water poured upon him from the heavy timbered gallery of the Cunzie Neuk, once the royal mint.  The carting office that occupied the street floor was closed, or Auld Jock would have sought shelter there.  He struggled up the rise, made slippery by rain and grime.  Then, as the street turned southward in its easy curve, there was some shelter from the house walls.  But Auld Jock was quite exhausted and incapable of caring for himself.  In the ancient guildhall of the candlemakers, at the top of the Row, was another carting office and Harrow Inn, a resort of country carriers.  The man would have gone in there where he was quite unknown or, indeed, he might even have lain down in the bleak court that gave access to the tenements above, but for Bobby’s persistent and cheerful barking, begging and nipping.