Here was a literary flavor that gave added attraction to a man who sat
at the feet of the Scottish muses. The landlord sighed as he went back
to the doorway, and he stood there listening to the clatter of the cart
and rough-shod horse and to the mournful howling of the little dog,
until the sounds died away in Forest Road.
Mr. Traill would have been surprised to know, perhaps, that the confines
of the city were scarcely passed before Bobby stopped protesting and
grieving and settled down patiently to more profitable work. A human
being thus kidnapped and carried away would have been quite helpless.
But Bobby fitted his mop of a black muzzle into the largest hole of his
wicker prison, and set his useful little nose to gathering news of his
whereabouts.
If it should happen to a dog in this day to be taken from Ye Olde
Greyfriars Dining-Rooms and carried southward out of Edinburgh there
would be two miles or more of city and suburban streets to be traversed
before coming to the open country. But a half century or more ago
one could stand at the upper gate of Greyfriars kirkyard or Heriot's
Hospital grounds and look down a slope dotted with semi-rustic houses,
a village or two and water-mills, and then cultivated farms, all the way
to a stone-bridged burn and a toll-bar at the bottom of the valley. This
hillside was the ancient Burghmuir where King James of old gathered a
great host of Scots to march and fight and perish on Flodden Field.
Bobby had not gone this way homeward before, and was puzzled by the
smell of prosperous little shops, and by the park-like odors from
college campuses to the east, and from the well-kept residence park
of George Square. But when the cart rattled across Lauriston Place he
picked up the familiar scents of milk and wool from the cattle and
sheep market, and then of cottage dooryards, of turned furrows and of
farmsteads.
The earth wears ever a threefold garment of beauty. The human person
usually manages to miss nearly everything but the appearance of things.
A few of us are so fortunate as to have ears attuned to the harmonies
woven on the wind by trees and birds and water; but the tricky weft of
odors that lies closest of all, enfolding the very bosom of the earth,
escapes us. A little dog, traveling with his nose low, lives in another
stratum of the world, and experiences other pleasures than his master.
He has excitements that he does his best to share, and that send him
flying in pursuit of phantom clues.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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