Greyfriars Bobby

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - When the time-gun boomed from Edinburgh Castle Bobby gave a startled yelp. He was only a little country dog - the very youngest and smallest and shaggiest of Skye terriers-bred on a heathery slope of the Pentland hills where the loudest sound was the bark of a collie or the tinkle of a sheep-bell. That morning he had come to the weekly market with Auld Jock a farm laborer and the Grassmarket of the Scottish capital lay in the narrow valley at the southern base of Castle Crag. Two hundred feet above it the time-gun was mounted in the half-moon battery on an overhanging crescent-shaped ledge of rock. In any part of the city the report of the one-o'clock gun was sufficiently alarming but in the Grassmarket it was an earth-rending explosion directly overhead. It needed to be heard but once there to be registered on even a little dog's brain. Bobby had heard it many times and he never failed to yelp a sharp protest at the outrage to his ears; but as the gunshot was always followed by a certain happy event it started in his active little mind a train of pleasant associations.