Although dismayed and self-accusing for having frightened Auld Jock into taking flight by his incautious talk of a doctor, not for an instant did the landlord of Greyfriars Dining-Rooms entertain the idea of following him.The old man had only to cross the street and drop down the incline between the bridge approach and the ancient Chapel of St.Magdalen to be lost in the deepest, most densely peopled, and blackest gorge in Christendom.
Well knowing that he was safe from pursuit, Auld Jock chuckled as he gained the last low level.Fever lent him a brief strength, and the cold damp was grateful to his hot skin.None were abroad in the Cowgate; and that was lucky for, in this black hole of Edinburgh, even so old and poor a man was liable to be set upon by thieves, on the chance of a few shillings or pence.
Used as he was to following flocks up treacherous braes and through drifted glens, and surefooted as a collie, Auld Jock had to pick his way carefully over the slimy, ice-glazed cobble stones of the Cowgate.He could see nothing.The scattered gas-lamps, blurred by the wet, only made a timbered gallery or stone stairs stand out here and there or lighted up a Gothic gargoyle to a fantastic grin.The street lay so deep and narrow that sleet and wind wasted little time in finding it out, but roared and rattled among the gables, dormers and chimney-stacks overhead.Happy in finding his master himself again, and sniffing fresh adventure, Bobby tumbled noisily about Auld Jock's feet until reproved.And here was strange going.Ancient and warring smells confused and insulted the little country dog's nose.After a few inquiring and protesting barks Bobby fell into a subdued trot at Auld Jock's heels.
To this shepherd in exile the romance of Old Edinburgh was a sealed book.It was, indeed, difficult for the most imaginative to believe that the Cowgate was once a lovely, wooded ravine, with a rustic burn babbling over pebbles at its bottom, and along the brook a straggling path worn smooth by cattle on their driven way to the Grassmarket.Then, when the Scottish nobility was crowded out of the piled-up mansions, on the sloping ridge of High Street that ran the mile from the Castle to Holyrood Palace, splendor camped in the Cowgate, in villas set in fair gardens, and separated by hedge-rows in which birds nested.
In time this ravine, too, became overbuilt.Houses tumbled down both slopes to the winding cattle path, and the burn was arched over to make a thoroughfare.Laterally, the buildings were crowded together, until the upper floors were pushed out on timber brackets for light and air.Galleries, stairs and jutting windows were added to outer walls, and the mansions climbed, story above story, until the Cowgate was an undercut canon, such as is worn through rock by the rivers of western America.
Lairds and leddies, powdered, jeweled and satin-shod, were borne in sedan chairs down ten flights of stone stairs and through torch-lit courts and tunnel streets, to routs in Castle or Palace and to tourneys in the Grassmarket.
From its low situation the Cowgate came in the course of time to smell to heaven, and out of it was a sudden exodus of grand folk to the northern hills.The lowest level was given over at once to the poor and to small trade.The wynds and closes that climbed the southern slope were eagerly possessed by divines, lawyers and literary men because of their nearness to the University.Long before Bobby's day the well-to-do had fled from the Cowgate wynds to the hilltop streets and open squares about the colleges.A few decent working-men remained in the decaying houses, some of which were at least three centuries old.But there swarmed in upon, and submerged them, thousands of criminals, beggars, and the miserably poor and degraded of many nationalities.Businesses that fatten on misfortune--the saloon, pawn, old clothes and cheap food shops-lined the squalid Cowgate.Palaces were cut up into honeycombs of tall tenements.Every stair was a crowded highway; every passage a place of deposit for filth; almost every room sheltered a half famished family, in darkness and ancient dirt.Grand and great, pious and wise, decent, wretched and terrible folk, of every sort, had preceded Auld Jock to his lodging in a steep and narrow wynd, and nine gusty flights up under a beautiful, old Gothic gable.
A wrought-iron lantern hanging in an arched opening, lighted the entrance to the wynd.With a hand outstretched to either wall, Auld Jock felt his way up.Another lantern marked a sculptured doorway that gave to the foul court of the tenement.No sky could be seen above the open well of the court, and the carved, oaken banister of the stairs had to be felt for and clung to by one so short of breath.On the seventh landing, from the exertion of the long climb, Auld Jock was shaken into helplessness, and his heart set to pounding, by a violent fit of coughing.Overhead a shutter was slammed back, and an angry voice bade him stop "deaving folk."The last two flights ascended within the walls.The old man stumbled into the pitch-black, stifling passage and sat down on the lowest step to rest.On the landing above he must encounter the auld wifie of a landlady, rousing her, it might be, and none too good-tempered, from sleep.Unaware that he added to his master's difficulties, Bobby leaped upon him and licked the beloved face that he could not see.
"Eh, laddie, I dinna ken what to do wi' ye.We maun juist hae to sleep oot." It did not occur to Auld Jock that he could abandon the little dog.And then there drifted across his memory a bit of Mr.Traill's talk that, at the time, had seemed to no purpose:
"Sir Walter happed the wee lassie in the pocket of his plaid--"He slapped his knee in silent triumph.In the dark he found the broad, open end of the plaid, and the rough, excited head of the little dog.
