Mistress Jeanie often brought out a little old milking stool on balmy mornings, and sat with knitting or mending in one of the narrow aisles, to advise her gude-mon in small matters. Bobby trotted quietly about, sniffing at everything with the liveliest interest, head on this side or that, alertly. His business, learned in his first summer in Greyfriars, was to guard the nests of foolish skylarks, song-thrushes, redbreasts and wrens, that built low in lilac, laburnum, and flowering currant bushes, in crannies of wall and vault, and on the ground. It cannot but be a pleasant thing to be a wee young dog, full of life and good intentions, and to play one's dramatic part in making an old garden of souls tuneful with bird song. A cry of alarm from parent or nestling was answered instantly by the tiny, tousled policeman, and there was a prowler the less, or a skulking cat was sent flying over tomb and wall. His duty done, without noise or waste of energy, Bobby returned to lie in the sun on Auld Jock's grave. Over this beloved mound a coverlet of rustic turf had been spread as soon as the frost was out of the ground, and a bonny briar bush planted at the head. Then it bore nature's own tribute of flowers, for violets, buttercups, daisies and clover blossoms opened there and, later, a spike or so of wild foxglove and a knot of heather. Robin redbreasts and wrens foraged around Bobby, unafraid; swallows swooped down from their mud villages, under the dizzy dormers and gables, to flush the flies on his muzzle, and whole flocks of little blue titmice fluttered just overhead, in their rovings from holly and laurel to newly tasseled firs and yew trees. The click of the wicket gate was another sort of alarm altogether. At that the little dog slipped under the fallen table-tomb and lay hidden there until any strange visitor had taken himself away. Except for two more forced returns and ingenious escapes from the sheepfarm on the Pentlands, Bobby had lived in the kirkyard undisturbed for six months. The caretaker had neither the heart to put him out nor the courage to face the minister and the kirk officers with a plea for him to remain. The little dog's presence there was known, apparently, only to Mr. Traill, to a few of the tenement dwellers, and to the Heriot boys. If his life was clandestine in a way, it was as regular of hour and duty and as well ordered as that of the garrison in the Castle.